We live in an era of ethereal and throwaway content. If evidence were needed, you need only cite social media. Twitter, which has announced it’s opening international offices in Ireland, is a classic example.

Twitter is all about empowering people or organisations to communicate — be it one to one, one to many or a general free-for-all. Admittedly it’s in fairly brief and staccato form, but on the plus side, this does mean that we have to be succinct and to the point.

So it’s perhaps only right that the first place that news of Twitter’s move to the emerald isle should appear was in an Industrial Development Authority tweet as @IDAIRELAND announced: “Ireland is trending. Twitter to establish international office in Dublin.”

Now you could argue, and some already have have, that the reason we’re getting the No.2 social media player (with estimates of 125m users) setting up in Ireland is motivated by low corporation tax (which surely is part of it) but it’s also because Ireland is a well-established centre for other dotcom players. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and many others already have a significant presence and use Ireland in many cases as a jumping-off point for taking on European markets.

For Twitter it’s likely that this is all about establishing a foothold in Europe in order to develop a viable commercial model which makes a return for investors. Twitter needs to grab a piece of the revenue pie commensurate with its influence. But where Google already has a solid revenue stream by placing relevant ads (AdWords) against searched content and Facebook has some amazingly detailed demographics on its users (Facebook Ads), Twitter is yet to make the big jump to a social media platform with an equally solid revenue model, currently relying on a product it calls promoted tweets.

That’s not to suggest that Twitter won’t strike a successful revenue model, but it’s pretty clear that the window of opportunity might be closing… fast. Now that Google has taken Google+ public, its own new attempt at getting onto the social media bandwagon, the space left for Twitter to take a cut of the available action is most likely set to shrink.

So you could argue that Twitter had little option but to grow its business into Europe and do it damn fast. It may not be about first mover advantage, but there’s little doubt that this particular bird needs to tweet less, get up early and catch more worms!

Meantime, as we recently highlighted, one area in which Twitter truly excels is in providing a powerful yet simple platform for businesses to communicate with customers. It’s been used successfully by big name brands in the FMCG, fashion and tech sectors and, if you’re not using it in your business yet, why not?

Ralph
@ralphenn

Written by Ralph Averbuch

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