Lack of Business Plan Could Equal Doom for Twitter

Is Twitter disappearing soon? I seriously doubt it, though they have yet to come up with a solid business plan. This post title is not far from reality though, and when you burn through 50 million like they have at Twitter with still nothing to show for it, doom is not far away. The reason for this post is not about how Twitter is hanging on by a thread, but how your site could be hanging on by a thread.

You Got To Have A Plan

One of the first questions I ask a client when building them a new site is “Why do you want a website?”

Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams of  Twitter apparently came up with the idea in a brainstorming session. They were looking for a new product idea they could develop. They did it, but what they forgot to develop was a plan on how to use it, aka make money from it. To me it seems simple for Twitter. Let everyone use it for free, and charge users that are more demanding to the system. An example of that would be to charge users with more than a certain amount of followers, or charge for users that tweet over a certain amount of times.

There lack of plan, no real fault to them, is burning through money, creating site outages, and are putting them at risk of falling off the map. They built Twitter, and they don’t know why!

Small Business Reality

My perspective of building websites is based on a couple of factors. Most of my clients are small business owners, and so am I. What do small business owners hate to do? Waste money! So this leads me back to my favorite question of why do you want a website.

Most small business owners give me the usual answers. Well…um…basically….my competitors do, or everyone else does, or classic one, “I want to look like a real company.” I then politely say “Let me know when you have a reason or plan for the site, and we will get to work on it.” Too many sites get built without one solid reason or purpose.

The owners that say to me “I simply want to have a site so my customers or prospects can get more information about me, phone number, address, stuff like that.” I will say, great, you have a plan. It may not big the largest goal for a website, but the owner has given me a specific reason on why they want it.  The site now has purpose.

Your Plan Should be Reflected on Your Site

A good business plan for a website should be easily reflected. What’s Google’s primary plan? To give the best search results, and sell targeted ad space that compliments their results. A good plan, and if you try their site, it does just that.

What’s eBay’s plan? To generate revenue from sales using several streams like getting a cut of the PayPal transaction, and charging users fees to sell their products. None of this will happen without a great selling platform, and if you go to their site you will find one of the best selling platforms on the web today. Not only does it help users sell, it encourages new visitors to join their system. The people running eBay for sure have a plan.

Twitter’s plan? They don’t have one, and it’s reflected on the site. It’s simply geared to allow you to chat with others. I read recently the may sell data to agencies on the back end, but I doubt that will be enough to make it a profitable entity. I’m also not sure if I like that idea. Your business model is to sell what I say to others?

A Little Purple Berry Has More Purpose

Comically, at least to me, I received a spam email trying to sell the Acai products as I finished up on this post. Note to Twitter…even spammers have a plan.

Without a site plan your site could be confusing your visitors, wasting money, and even worse, give a poor reflection of you. You could also be giving away a great idea like Twitter to Google Wave.