Twitter aims to increase their profits by prospecting businesses as a mean to of fueling tangible revenue pour out. Twitter cited that it can be done if they offer commercial accounts at a particular price. Additional plan of Twitter is the introduction of commercial accounts which include enlarged features for an additional cost. This plan will positively assist the site to increase their profits, and in return they can fairly compete with other existing social networking websites. Although rumors have been coming out thick and fast, no specific price has been given yet about the so called commercial accounts.
One significant application of Twitter is micro-blogging. It is an important feature which is being enjoyed by its huge users. Twitter also permits its users to post tweets with a limit of 140 characters. By first impression, Twitter is acknowledged as a social networking site. But throughout the years of continuous exposure to Twitter applications and features, several businesses have find out that Twitter can also be a potential tool to increase their sales. Business firms have learned to utilize the functions and capabilities of Twitter. A particular utilization is the generation of executive post internal messages.
Jeffrey Mann, Gartner analyst, has once quoted, “Despite the fact that Twitter is primarily aimed at individual users in the consumer market, many of those individuals work for companies and tweet about business issues, leading businesses to explore how they could best use it.” He further said that “If organizations have not defined a public Web participation policy, they should do so as quickly as possible.”
It is true that there are already business firms who are convinced with the efficiency of Twitter to enterprise functions. But are they enough to pacify the doubts and the forthcoming queries with regards to their credibility and applicability? Regardless of the discoveries made by some businesses, Twitter’s competency towards enterprise tasks has still lingered unanswered and yet to find out.
To give you a better viewpoint about the enterprise functions of Twitter, a research firm have tried to categorize it into four – direct, indirect, internal, and inbound signaling. Let us try to understand each of these categories.
Direct – this is a kind of enterprise application wherein a company or a business firm utilizes Twitter as a public-relations channel or a tool for marketing.
Indirect – this is a different application which only includes company employees that utilize tweets to elevate public awareness about their existence and their company. Microsoft-sponsored site ExecTweets did the indirect application when they make use of Twitter to increase their brand and the company as a whole.
Internal – this application involves executives and employees who are using social networking sites to have an internal discussion about a certain project or some other issues.
Inbound Signaling – this application mainly focus on utilizing Twitter to locate conversation threads regarding a specific product of company. The obtained information is then used to solve a problem or establish feedback. One specific example of inbound signaling is the incorporation of Twitter to Service Cloud of Salesforce.com.