When Twitter recently announced the ability to place all of your followers into lists I thought that they had struck a goldmine for future revenue streams and everything pointed towards a business model that made perfect sense – to me.

Then today it all went pear shaped as Biz Stone (Co-founder) announced a ‘non traditional’ way they will allow advertising on Twitter without telling us what it is – a great way to get spin going, especially when you are as popular as Twitter!

In my opinion Biz Stone and Twitter have just showed how dumb people can be when it comes to monetizing popular free programs. What did MySpace do? Sell advertising. What did Facebook do? Sell advertising. What is Twitter going to do? Sell advertising – albeit wrapped in a ‘non traditional’ catchphrase. The crux of all of this is that no-one has any idea how to make money out of free software that is popular and when you have no ideas, you turn to 3rd party advertisers.

Biz, I am sure advertising will bring in some revenue, but you have missed a golden opportunity here to take a different approach, it is a crazy idea, but people might actually be prepared to pay for software that makes their lives better. Here is the model I would have approached.

Premium Accounts

I know a premium account is just a stupid name for making more money than a normal account. Usually companies (think realestate.com.au and domain.com.au) create a popular site and then cut the throat of their core by making them look less important than premium companies. In real estate it is a joke, but with Twitter it would be different as it makes sense on top of a free model. Myhome.com.au do it with premium style listings on top of basic free listings. I don’t mind this approach as long as the user (the person looking for properties) is not getting search results compromised.

Basic
With Twitter nothing changes, you get all of the same features as you currently do, you are treated the same and all new updates are afforded to you. In other words – in other words we still love you and we understand without you – we could not operate successfully!

Premium – Multiple Accounts
You can create multiple accounts all under the one account. As an example. I have Agentpoint, Business2, Ginga and Zooproperty.com. Currently I have 4 Twitter accounts to manage. So I can now have a master account and merge others accounts under this one account – nothing changes for my followers.

When a user wants to follow me they can select what account(s) to follow or ‘follow all’. My default account is my master account – so if they do not choose any accounts, it then defaults to my master account.

Nothing changes when I Tweet as I have separate accounts to Tweet under and no-one gets annoyed.

Premium – Customise Theme
My “Twemium” account allows us to customise our Twitter theme some more. Better sidebar control, better backgrounds etc. All of my accounts now become a part of a left sidebar and can be click-able. I can also customise my background with a few extra features.

Fees

So what would a user pay as a premium price for these features? I would say $55 USD per annum is a fair price that most can afford for what essentially is a great service. Not everyone would need to upgrade and there is no penalty for not upgrading.

Revenue

Let’s say 20% of users upgrade to premium. Current estimates put twitter at about 5 million active users. So that would bring in around $55 million per annum. I would consider this a good return on what is essentially a 100 person company. How many companies could boast $550,00 in revenue per employee? This could easily grow to 100 million per annum.

If they get selfish and stupid they will fail. Twitter is no flash in the pan, but it we may get a little bored with it and if we are not careful only business will be interested and that will kill the platform.

Biz Stone tells us he is in no rush, well, he is in no rush to fail and everything they were doing up until now made sense. If advertiser revenue is their only idea with this software then they seriously need to take more time before making announcements.

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In a recent press release, RE/MAX boast 99.9% of the national share of voice in TV advertising in the US for the first quarter of the year, but RE/MAX & other real estate franchises should take a close look at how ineffective their marketing of these TV commercials has been over the internet.

RE/MAX claims:

“While many of the real estate industry’s biggest players are scaling back their TV buys due to economic realities, the RE/MAX share of voice for national TV advertising jumped from 50% in 2008 to 99.9% in the first quarter of 2009.”

RE/MAX have done a good job with their new straight talking  TV ads, but I can’t help but think that they could increase their audience by leveraging their video content across the internet via their huge network of agents/staff, databases of clients and via social media.

Whilst it was great to see that RE/MAX have taken the initiative & leveraged their video content by uploading the commercials onto YouTube, unfortunately that’s where their effective use of the internet for these videos seems to grind to a halt.

The collective online marketing power of a franchise like RE/MAX is enormous.

They have something like 100,000 Associates working within their company & their LeadStreet campaign successfully created a database of a Million More Leads in Six Months for US Agents, yet upon writing this post the Kick – 2009 RE/MAX Commercial is the video that appears to be their most popular out of their 2009 commercials uploaded onto YouTube so far, but it’s had less than 10,000 views over the past 4 months.

How to Promote Your Real Estate Videos Online

Here’s just a few ways that real estate franchises & independent offices could use the power of their existing network to help promote their brand, generate lots of Free traffic to their videos & enhance their online marketing presence.

• Share the videos on Facebook, MySpace, forums, etc.

• Embed the YouTube video within a short blog post.

• Include a link to the video within email marketing campaigns.

• Tweet about the video on Twitter.

Imagine the power of marketing that 100,000 RE/MAX Associates could have if they used some of these strategies to promote these professionally created TV Commercials out to their network of clients & associates via the internet.

If each Associate only got 10 people in a month to view the commercial, that would equate to approx. 1 million viewers per month for FREE.

In fact, if RE/MAX franchise really wanted to, they could get 10′s of millions of viewers to their videos each month at almost no cost. Now that’s what I’d call a powerful message.

Finally, there are over 100 alternative video sites other than YouTube. Real estate franchises should be uploading their videos/TV commercials onto some of these other sites as well to help generate even more FREE traffic & exposure of their brand.

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With Myhome soon leaving the local landscape soon I came to thinking of what would make the ultimate portal. I know Peter has posted on something similar before but I thought I would throw my hat in the ring and mockup what I believe would be the perfect portal from my perspective as an agent.

Technology
Keep a familiar navigational style similar to current portals however utilise the latest web 2 technology to improve functionality without sacrificing usability. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel, just make it better and go faster.

Bandwidth and storage is cheap these days so the site would feature high resolution photos and full screen slideshows. Read the rest of this article »

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