Dell Pulling in $3 Million from Twitter

Dell is pulling in $12.3 billion dollars in revenues and getting a few million dollars from their Twitter participation might not be their cup of coffee. Wrong! Dell has reported that they have pulled in $3 million dollars because of utilizing Twitter. A million dollars is still a lot of money even for a billion dollar firm; plus compare this to the amount of operational cost to participate in Twitter, Dell finds a very good case on using this social network phenomenon.

The amount is a result of clicks from users thru their Twitter posts where they initially made $1 million USD in the first 6 months.

Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, said they would be watching over the results whether they are tracking at the right level.

The business model of Twitter does not guarantee exponential growth in the millions of dollars and they have yet to determine how to turn their phenomenal status into gold; companies like Dell for instance have turned this network to their advantage. This tells you that technology alone doesn’t guarantee dominance but strong business acumen and the power to turn things into money is the integral part of growing any business.

Twitter has reacted to Dell’s earnings thru their spokeswoman, Jenna Sampson, “For now, monetization of this type of activity remains unknown, however, as the network grows, the company will be committing more resources toward profitability."

Gartner analyst Allen Weiner has a recommendation for Twitter, “Certainly one of the ways Twitter can begin to think of itself as a money-making operation is to facilitate a lot of these things, build it as part of the infrastructure. So if you're a company, you can pay Twitter a certain amount of money and they can directly distribute coupons on your behalf, or clear transactions.”.

Dell has about 600,000 followers which put them in the top 100 most followed accounts as tracked by TwitterCounter and Twitterholic. The company publishes around 6-10 posts a week and they track clicks and sales via their proprietary software.

Other businesses in the Top 100 are Whole Foods Market Inc, Woot.com, Zappos.com, & JetBlue Airways Corp. Both Whole Food and JetBlue have already confirmed they have not monetized their Twitter activity while it is unknown whether Woot and Zappos are reaping anything from the social network giant.

Twitter who has around 41 million unique U.S.-based visitors in April according to Nielsen, continuous to grow and a lot of companies are going to grow their businesses thru this network.

I have been a member of Twitter since it's early days but have'nt used this as much as I wanted. Now, I started looking for Microsoft twitter accounts and found what says to be the official Microsoft twitter account -- http://www.twitter.com/microsoft. Given that there are only 733 followers, I doubt this is the real thing. So I went ahead and searched for other Microsoft accounts and found this list via Sarah Perez:

@WindowsLive – Official Twitter account of Microsoft Windows Live

@liveframework – liveframework

@livemesh – Sync, share, and access the information you care about—wherever you happen to be.

@SharePoint – The official tweetstream of the SharePoint product group - managed by @LLiu

@bizspark – Microsoft BizSpark - Software, Support, Visibility

@zunemarketplace – Zune Marketplace is a store for the way you love music, with brand-new releases every week and a huge selection of music in every style imaginable

@wmdev – Windows Mobile

@microsofttag – Microsoft Tag

@ch9 – listen to the cockpit, help us fly the plane

@ch10 – Channel 10 is Microsoft's online community for the technology enthusiast

@ch8 – Microsoft's community for students

@mixonline – Come check us out at www.visitmix.com

@MIX09 – The Next Web Now, pre-empted by @MIX07, @MIX08 and @PDC08

@SiteNamedDesire – Want a copy of A Website Named Desire? This li'l birdie will tell you how. Wait for the tweets.

@MicrsftTech4All – News from Microsoft Accessibility team, which strives for technology to be usable by everyone & complements our physical & cognitive abilities.

@MSDN – Updates from the MSDN site team.

@adCenterBlog – News, Tips, Tricks & Best Practices From The Guys At Microsoft adCenter

Anyways, I am feeling that I need to use twitter more and more as there are a lot of creative ways you can do to help grow your business and profile. To learn about maximizing twitter, you can read Darren's blog at Twitip.

Image source from Twitter, news from reuters.

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