PhD doctorate

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More marketing and sales opportunities

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Online incentive scheme

Threats:

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Competitors

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Users might lose interest over time

How does Twitter generate revenue?

1 - Almost all of Twitter's revenue - about 85% of it - comes from advertising on its site.

There are three main ways for a company or an individual to advertise on Twitter: by promoting a tweet that will appear in people's timelines, promoting a whole account, or promoting a trend.

2- Data licensing is Twitter's second major revenue stream.

The micro-blogger sells something known as the "firehose", its public data, which often adds up to about 500 million tweets each day. Companies can dive deep into the data to analyse consumer trends and sell their insight on to other brands and companies.

Because the tweets are public, consumers also have access to this data.

Firms could use the data to do simple things, he says, like monitoring sentiment towards their brand or product.

3- While Twitter may have proved it has the potential to make money, analysts say there are still hurdles to profitability. The company is spending a lot of money investing in advertising technology and expanding its team, And it plans to keep spending after going public.

Twitter Competition

Major competitors:

· Web based

· Google+: 1.6 billion users. Inflated numbers as everyone with a gmail account is included.

· Facebook: 1.28 billion users, communication - Digital timeline and multi use functions such as picture and video posting

· Myspace: 30+ million users, communication - Digital timeline and multi use functions such as picture and video posting

· Linkedin: 200 million users, professional, resume posting and networking

· Mobile or app based:

· Chitter: Twitter for individual universities campuses (anonymous user posting). Register with school email. Can only post to your university community.

· erodr: Similar to Chitter, you can check in to other universities.

· Foursquare: Check in app. Users announce that they are at a location and get coins. Can become mayor of a location that is frequently visited. Users can check out ratings and reviews for food, and services around the globe.

· Snapchat: I’m still not sure what this is for. Texting with pictures?

· Instagram: Post your photos.

· Chitter, foursquare and erodr are location based.

· Others can have global reach but users need to friend or follow your account.

Twitter has competition, mainly in the form of local posting apps. Yik Yak and erodr are among various apps growing in popularity across North America. Yik Yak is a posting app that allows users to post thoughts and photos similar to the way twitter is used and erodr can be seen as a combination of both Twitter and Yik Yak.

Although Twitter is not the only social media tool out there, it is somewhat unique in that it has global reach and relative transparency. There are of course a few others similar to Twitter but the majority are smaller or more regionally based, often with relative anonymity. While most Twitter users use a handle that incorporates some use of their name or a play on it, many of Twitters competitors do not require any form of self identification.

Apps such as Yik Yak use symbols to identify posts from the same users in each thread, it changes from thread to thread, so this allows many to use the app as a trolling mechanism. Recently Yik Yak has offered the option of creating a unique handle, similar to twitter but Yakkers are still typically unidentified, using names such as “IsThisGoodEnough”, “JackNHoff”, “click” for example, rather than actual names.

Along with the anonymity of most users, many of theses types of competitors also place limits on the range that posts are viewed. Yik Yak, for example has a range of 10 miles though others, such as erodr have a radar feature which you can use to connect to a hub elsewhere in the country. Yik Yak also offers users to join herds which are groups in a region that allows users to connect with their home locations while away.

Where Twitter, facebook and other sharing apps, are posts made to friends and followers, apps such as Yik Yak and erodr are visible to anyone in the area. Users are also, in a sense, moderators of the posts, voting on posts that are good or bad. Yik Yak places the top voted posts higher on its “hot” tab, erodr users do the same but popular posts stay longer and less popular ones are pushed down the list and eventually deleted.

One advantage that erodr has over other similar apps is the ability to post both anonymous or as yourself.  Disadvantage right now is that it is only available to American universities. Erodr and chitter are local university communities only. Posts are only seen among others registered to a specific location, mainly universities, though erodr can have a national reach if the user chooses to broadcast publicly.

Less public and carefree are applications such as linkedIn, which is a resume posting and job networking site, and yammer, which is in internally used communication tool and sharing service for companies to use to help streamline communications.

Twitter is a leader in quick and open posting, called tweets, and will likely remain so globally.  This may be attributed to being among the first apps of this nature and others become an unnecessary burden to keep up, similar to the way nothing is really competitive with facebook, atleast on a global scale, with there being Asian versions of the social networking site.