Twitter Election Site: Are We Seeing a Business Model for Twitter?

Yesterday we saw the first niche website launched by Twitter – Twitter E08 focused on presidential election campaign in the US. The website works by simply filtering twitter messages (tweets) from all users by certain keywords and aggregate these messages into one page. The site is updated with new topical messages in real time.

In addition to that, users can send their own messages right from the site and these messages will be sent to their Twitter timeline as well. Besides, the site also features messages sent from the main heroes of the entire process – candidates themselves (or their representatives which sounds more feasible, of course).

And while yesterday everyone seemed to be focused only on the elections and the upcoming debate between the candidates (that obviously provided lots of fresh tweets to the new aggregator of political opinions), I think we missed one very important thing – this can very well be the beginning of a long-awaited business model for Twitter.

In my yesterday’s post about the event I actually mentioned that we should expect some further websites like this to be launched by Twitter in the near future. Now that the technology of building such websites is here (based on Summize Twitter search product acquired by Twitter in July), launching the next one should not be difficult at all – just change the keywords used by the aggregator and make some tweaks to the design of the site and you are done.

Yesterday Don Reisinger over at TechCrunch actually had the same idea that Twitter needed to introduce further niche sites in form of groups where like-minded individuals could connect. But while all the like-minded people connected is obviously a great idea, we should keep in mind that Twitter is a business (after all, even if the team tries so hard to pretend it is not) and as such it is supposed to at least try to behave like one – and creating value for people ideally should mean building a revenue stream for the business itself. So this is where such niche sites (or groups if we follow the terminology introduced at TechCrunch some time ago as the most needed Twitter functionality) could play an important role for Twitter.

Any marketer will tell you that it is easier to reach a specific audience when you know where exactly it is. And to any advertiser a niche site targeting potential customers of this advertiser is much more appealing than some generalist site full of information that attracts all types of visitors. And this is why I think Twitter niche sites could very easily be used for monetization – Twitter could launch dozens of such websites, aggregate relevant content to them, make people visit them to read more opinions about some particular topic of high interest to them – and sell ads alongside this content to interested companies.

Besides, because of high concentration of textual content on a particular topic, such niche websites will bring some generic traffic from search engines – and this traffic will also be used to talk to potential advertisers and some of the newly-arrived people may very well convert into Twitter users if they are interested in a particular topic Twitter has a site for (even if they had no reasons to create an account before that).

I honestly believe launching a good number of such specific websites could be a brilliant idea for Twitter and if done right could result in both growth of the microblogging service itself and in turning Twitter into a profitable (or at least generating some revenue) business. The most important factors here are that such niche sites should be focused on a topic that is popular among internet users and generates lots of traffic and also has a number of potential advertisers that could be interested in associating their brands with such websites.

If Twitter also manages to bring some of the most interesting companies, products or personalities (heroes) into such websites so that their messages could be featured for all the users to communicate with the newsmakers in this or that particular area, this could serve as an additional (very important) boosting factor as well. So here I have compiled a small list of suggestions to Twitter for the future niche content websites along with the ideas for the heroes and advertisers as well.

Twitter Gadgets

It is very well known that Twitter has initially attracted a lot of geeks and is still the place where many of them gather to discuss the latest and greatest innovations in technology and the latest arrivals to the gadgets world. I think many of the users will be quite happy about having a specialized place where they could track all the news about their favorite topics.

Twitter Apple

This one will obviously be a very hot topic as Apple is known to be able to generate tons of buzz whenever the company has a new announcement. Apple’s fan base is rather strong on Twitter and generates numerous tweets about every single event even remotely related to Apple.

Twitter Fashion

This could have the highest chances of bringing more women to chat about various makeup products and the latest fashion news to Twitter and make the service even more mainstream than it now is. Could be relatively inactive initially since it is not all that common for women to discuss their feminine things on Twitter (or maybe I just follow the wrong women) but if it allowed to only send updates to this particular site so that the fashionable talks could be concentrated in one place where only those interested could see them, this could solve the problem for many women trying to behave like we don’t care about everything crafted specifically for women online.

Twitter Auto (or cars)

Very obvious – I have seen people discussing their new cars and sharing impressions with other Twitter users and asking for advice about what they could do to fix this or that problem. Having a single place to take a look at all such opinions would obviously not hurt.

I am sure that you get the general idea and already realize the full potential of such niche websites launched by Twitter. I personally believe it will be very addictive for people really caring about a certain subject to spend quite some time watching continuously updated news and opinions about the favorite subject. And the most important thing is that such niche websites could be extremely appealing to advertisers so if the Twitter team finally decides they are ready to make some money, hopefully they will use this idea as well.