Twitter: We Will make money by the end of the year

Santosh Jayaram, VP of Business Opertaions at Twitter was a panelist at a Social Media Monetization Session at TieCon 2009. He talked about Twitter’s huge growth and how it has become a part of a a 24-7 bi-directional(or multi) communication. He says ‘Engagement’ is the central mantra and that they owe a lot to the developer community that has build hundreds of applications on top of their platform.

In terms of a revenue model he mentioned that they just started to collect data and are experimenting with about 4 or 5 different ideas. He confidently said that they will be making ‘Money’ by the end of the year. One of their monetization strategy is to have ‘Promotional’ Accounts.’  These accounts will be able to establish communication with their customer and fan base.

Santosh cited a lot of examples where consumers who vented out frustration about about a service/brand by tweeting were often directly contacted by the concerned brand to make up to them. He thus a sees a lot of bi-directional communication between the consumers and the services that could be tapped by Twitter. I hope they do make money. Good luck to them. What do you guys think ?