Twitter’s @Earlybird to Start Offering Shopping Deals

Twitter has been slowly building a revenue model, which is very much still in the early days, and is continuing to expand its options. Having introduced a couple of interesting advertising products, it now looks like Twitter may be getting into the shopping deals business.

The company set up a new account, Earlybird, which is not yet active, but which would eventually be used to tweet interesting deals and promotions. Twitter is not saying very much at the moment, but it has confirmed that it’s an official account and that it’s going to have some interesting announcements to make later on.

"There are interesting 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.

Companies would pay Twitter to have their products promoted and could cut 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.

But the hard part may be convincing users to follow @earlybird in the first place. After all, who would opt-in to be bombarded with advertising? If, however, the deals coming from the account are enticing enough, it is very possible that a lot of users will be interested in following the account. There are plenty of websites out there that work on this exact premise, like the recently acquired Woot.

One of the early Twitter success stories is Dell’s which sold several million dollars’ worth of computers through its account and this was back when the site had a much smaller audience. And if Earlybird does prove successful, Twitter could expand to specific markets with offers on a particular type of products or aimed at a smaller region.