Twitter is a Business App

The Kogi BBQ Truck in Los Angeles uses it to announce where it will be. Legions of hungry people follow it and track the truck on Twitter. When they arrive at the truck, they Twitter an announce how lucky they are to be in line and eating a delicious Korean Short Rib Taco.

This is the only form of mass media advertising for the Kogi BBQ Truck, word of mouth amplified by Twitter, and guess what its free. For not at least, more on that later.

Any business would be foolish not to use Twitter to advertise. Imagine finding a way to spread news to a large audience without having to spend money on an expensive marketing campaign. Twitter turns web ads and its head because anyone can generate a Tweet creating the all important buzz surrounding a product. Buzz.

Restaurants use it to announce daily specials. My company uses it to announce product upgrades and features. At some point Twitter will have to beginning charging Business that use the service. It's proven to be a valuable marketing tool. Its only a question of whether or not Twitter will charge a Flat Rate depending on the number of Tweets for a business per month or begin charging per-Tweets.

If Tweeter does begin to charge per Tweet then it will have to create a business back end to the Website to allow business and individuals to check how the Tweet has propagated on Twitter.
How many 'mentions' a Tweet has received, how many 'ReTweets", direct Messages including the Tweet have traveled between Twitter Users. BusinessWeek has an article on Twitter Speak and all the relative terms.

ReTweet: To repost something that's already in the Twitter stream. Usually preceeded by "RT" and "@[username]," to give credit to the original poster.

Until Twitter develops a business backend to track ReTweets I don't see Twitter creating a per-Tweet business model, but it is promising to see it develop a stable revenue model.

At the end of the day Twitter is a business, it was spawned out of a create idea to use the web and SMS to communicate freely with anyone in the world. However to maintain it it will have to figure out a way to pay the bills.

Everyone has got to eat, especially the folks at Twitter.