Twittertise – Another Tool for Brand Management on Twitter

Only yesterday we reported on TwittAd - a new marketplace to connect Twitter account owners with potential advertisers to sell some graphic ads right on our Twitter profiles. The discussion on that post and in comments on other blogs was around real potential of such a service to sell any ads and provide any value to advertisers at all. Anthony Ha over at VentureBeat even argued that these ads will hardly be visible at all and I tend to agree with him myself.

But the interesting development of the situation was that one of the commentators on Anthony’s post suggested Anthony to take a look at a new service launched in alpha over the weekend claiming to work in the same field. While I am not Anthony (obviously) I thought he would not mind if I take a look myself since the question of monetizing Twitter by Twitter users (not by Twitter - the owners still don’t seem to care about it) seems to be a hot one these days.

Twittertise is a service that is intended for marketing people to use Twitter as an advertising platform and track the success of their “branded communications” with customers. Basically here everything is about branding, not about advertising at all. After all, advertising process must feature someone paying money and someone earning money. Here it does not happen, even though it is an interesting approach to branding on Twitter.

In its core Twittertise gives anyone a place to create and schedule some promotional campaigns in the form of tweets containing a URL. After that Twittertise uses Bit.ly to shorten the URL and once the tweet goes live Twittertise will allow a user to see stats on how many people click the link and traffic sources (web pages where people clicked the link).

And while it is definitely not about advertising, it can really be useful to any company relying on Twitter to promote something or to announce news to customers (both existing and potential): using Twittertise any company will be able to see exactly how efficient every single message is and how many people are actually interested in this message.

Another use that I see for Twittertise is for PR/branding professionals. PR firms usually have a number of clients that may have various news scheduled to be distributed at a certain time - and this is where Twittertise can help. In addition to scheduling the tweets to be sent at a certain time, it will also provide statistics on which messages reach potential customers the best. So while it is not about monetizing profiles or actually earning money on Twitter, many of the companies looking into branding on Twitter must at least try this out. I also see a great potential for the service to be either acquired or integrated with some of the popular Twitter clients like Twhirl to provide us with the same scheduling/tracking tools without using additional services.

While Twittertise is in alpha stage of development, anyone can already access and start using it without doing anything beyond logging in with the usual Twitter account credentials. Here is a video describing how Twittertise works for anyone interested:

Twittertise Overview from whalewisdom on Vimeo