Nuvota

I’ve been asking myself this question for a while now:  Is Twitter in itself really powerful enough for someone to build a business around it?

Most of the time, I see Twitter being used either to generate traffic for a website (blog, services etc.), which is actually a great online marketing strategy (I am doing this for this site too). Other times, it’s being used by spammers to push their affiliate links.

But what about creating a brand that only lives on Twitter (no website or other social media profiles) that truly differentiates itself, creates value and makes money? I’m sure I am not the first one with this idea, but I wanted to test it for myself.

So over the next three months I will be using the following scenario to run the “Twitter Stand Alone Test”:

Target Market:

I will be focusing on moms that are using Twitter. The reason why I chose this target market is that moms can be easily identified in their bios on Twitter and the size of this group is large enough for the test (see below).

Market Sizing:

There are approximately 111,000 mothers on Twitter. How did I come up with this number? I used Twellow which is a Twitter directory that indexes the bios of Twitter users. By using the keyword “mom” (63,000) and “mother” (43,000), I came up with 111,000 hits. I also used another directory, TweepSearch running the same keywords to make sure the Twellow numbers made sense.

Characteristic of Target Market:

Moms love their kids. They are concerned about them and want to make sure they are getting the best of everything.

Branding/Offering:

I will create a persona based on the characteristics of our target market. This persona will entertain moms on a daily basis and make them laugh. (I will reveal the twitter name and more details regarding the persona after the test phase is over).

Monetization:

Money will be made via affiliate links that are specifically targeted to moms. The key thing is that this is not spam, but contextual information that moms will find useful.

Approach:

Step 1: Get an avatar image from istockphoto for $6. An avatar is the little image that you see next to the tweets (messages) sent out on Twitter.

Step 2: Use TwitArt to get a customized Twitter background (also called skin) for $79. A Twitter background is what you see on your screen surrounding the message stream when you click on someone’s Twitter profile.

Step 3: Start scheduling 6-12 entertaining tweets (messages) per day using Hootsuite .

Step 4: Use TweetAdder to automatically follow people that have the keyword “mom” or “mother” in their profile

Step 5: Start adding the occasional affiliate link into the message stream.

Measures of success:

Besides the obvious monetary success measures such as affiliate commissions, clicks on affiliate links, and conversion rates, I will also track the following success measures:

• Followers to following ratio => it is always better to have more people following you than the other way around; it makes you look more desirable
• Average re-tweets (someone forwarding a message) per tweet => this will let me know whether my messages are really valuable
• Number/nature of dialogues => depending on the type of message, the number of people that reply back to me which shows how engaged my community truly is

So, this is the current plan of action. I will post regular updates over the next three months reporting on my progress, findings and challenges.

Case Study – Part II