San Francisco — It has been rightly said that the early bird gets the worm — so kudos to the world’s most popular microblogging website Twitter that is courageously dipping its feather into a new revenue-generating stream by way of its @Earlybird account — or at least pointing to places where deals can be had.
Twitter is not saying very much at the moment, but it has confirmed that it is an official account and the company has some interesting broadcasts in store to make later on, it now looks like Twitter may be getting into the shopping deals business.
The chirping bird has been slowly building a revenue model, which is very much still in the early days, and is continuing to expand its options. On Tuesday the company’s new service, aptly named @earlybird, is an official Twitter account, which is not yet active, but the company eventually plans to feed with interesting deals and promotions at both online and offline retailers, as well as “sneak peeks and events.” Users who follow the account will see these entries just like any other tweet in their stream.
The account will recommend special short-term offers only from advertisers. Advertisers will stipulate the terms of the deals while Twitter will pick deals it thinks will be interesting to followers, all while earning a revenue share. The company will start with nationwide offers in the U.S., and then possibly extend them down by location or vertical. Twitter hinted that if the project is successful, it might go for fashion or music-focused EarlyBird accounts.
“Every couple of days, our Earlybird at Twitter HQ lays a golden egg,” the company said on a wiki explaining the service. “Inside this wondrous egg is a piece of parchment with the day’s magical deal.”
According to ReadWriteWeb, who discovered the news first, the account will feed its followers (read: opt-in) with shopping deals. As it is today, the account is protected and it is not clear whether it will remain so in the future.
“There are many fascinating things in store for @earlybird. Keep waking up early and you might be the first to find out what they are,” a Twitter spokeswoman told Read Write Web, when asked for comment on the account. Twitter is not providing any details at this point but it is pretty simple to figure out how Twitter could use the account.
The EarlyBird account charts out yet another promising revenue stream for the company, beyond Promoted Tweets, Trends, and selling real-time data access to Microsoft and Google.
Companies would reimburse Twitter to have their products promoted and could share a special deal for customers coming from the microblogging service. With 190 million worldwide visitors, Twitter’s audience is certainly large enough to be very, very interesting to all manner of companies.
The deals could be on products, like iPods or diapers, or on events, like concert tickets or travel. In a post on a company blog, Twitter indicated that it could filter deals by category, like apparel or gadgets, in the future. Twitter emphasized that it would be selective about which deals were offered and “try and make these deals interesting and of value to you.”
The chirpy company has adopted the concept from private and limited-time sale sites, like Gilt, Groupon and Woot (which Amazon.com recently acquired), a recent trend in online shopping. It also takes advantage of what companies like Dell, which attributes millions of dollars in sales to posting deals on Twitter, are already doing.
So it seems like Twitter is eventually going to be holding on to some of those golden eggs for itself, while offering some of the worms for its users!