Dell reveals it has made $6.5m out of Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Dell reveals it has made $6.5m out of Twitter

community.brandrepublic.com

The article seems to suggest that twitter makes up a sales channel that generated M$6.5 in revenues. That isn't M$6.5 in profits for a margin-challenged business. Also, there is no indication this is incremental revenue. For all we know, Twitter simply displaced existing email newsletter revenue or RSS feed revenue.

It could still be a very good thing, for example if it lowers costs. But I would like to understand whether this is incremental business or simply replacing another mechanism.

I'd like to think that the retweeting phenomenon really could lead to Dell getting entirely new business from people who follow people who follow Dell. But I don't know.

I agree with you. Nothing indicates that it's business it wouldn't have had otherwise. Yes, their Twitter account is where the traffic and sales came from, but what part of it wouldn't have resulted in a sale without Twitter is the key element.

One thing is sure though: it costs a lot less for them to send tweets than to send emails.

For any major company any given channels' numbers have some percentage of sales which have cannibalized from other channels. That's just the nature of the universe. There's no accurate way to measure how much is incremental revenue versus cannibalized from another channel.

So is some of that 6.5 million cannibalized from another channel. Yes. Is all of it? No. Some of it is new (new customers or new sales due to reaching out to existing or potential customers). It's also a dirt cheap channel, which is key.

For ANY company, driving $6.5 million in revenue via a new marketing channel which has close to zero cost, is a great win.

And Twitter has made $0 from Dell.

They still have intentions on making money, though I　think it will come from their recent partnerships with search engines google and bing.

Is this a lot? Dell has a $25B market cap.

The brand relationship management on twitter is a bit overhyped, in my opinion. CRM tools don't scale well. This becomes (as others here have mentioned) just another channel. Facebook pages are another. Email is another. The company blog is another.

This is one of the first hard data 7 figure sales number from a zero cost channel I've seen. That makes it important I think:)

This is not a zero cost channel. The companies very active on Twitter have full time people dedicated to it.

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