Profiling – Twitter joining the bandwagon!
Twitter – the microblogging platform – boasts millions of subscribers, and its user base is experiencing exponential growth. The time is right for it to go the way of AdWords. With millions already invested, but a negligible Return on Investment, it is only to be expected that Twitter would soon start employing some payback strategies. Now, it seems, is the time for Twitter to follow in the footsteps of most other social networking sites.
I logged into my Twitter account early this morning, and I immediately noticed some strange looking boxes appearing just underneath my profile stats: see the picture.
Currently these boxes are displaying Twitter applications – they started appearing soon after Twitter returned after two hours of maintenance downtime. How soon before we see advertisements taking their place? Advertisements mean that Twitter is profiling its user-base to ‘sell the right products to the right people’. Read more about profiling by following Professor Ian Angell’s post here.
The digital advertisement market is already facing heat because of the credit crunch, and it would interesting to see what strategies Twitter employs to stoke the fires in its engine-room.
Some readers might be tempted to think that Twitter, with only status updates, has little information with which to profile users. Think again! Twitter has real time information about each user’s current activities! They can target Ads with extreme accuracy, and will be experimenting with some clever profiling strategies. Don’t be surprised if, when you tweet “got my loan approved, Yipee!”, you find that predators are trying to sell you cars, holidays, or restaurants in which to celebrate now that you have “loadsamoney”!
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