What Killed Twitter’s Early Bird?

With Early Bird, Twitter jumped on the private sale bandwagon earlier this year, but today the company announced that it is closing down this marketing vehicle for now. According to Twitter COO Dick Costolo, the company had "tremendous early success with it, but it needs to be reworked or rethought.” The @earlybird account promoted exclusive offers to Twitter users from brands like JetBlue and Disney.

Sponsor

At launch, Early Bird looked like a good way for Twitter to make money. Other brands like Dell had already successfully used Twitter to sell their products and an official account from Twitter would surely catch users’ attention. Somehow, though, the Early Bird promotions never quite caught on with Twitter’s users.

Why Didn’t Early Bird Work Out for Twitter?

Maybe the deals simply weren’t targeted well enough and not interesting to Twitter’s users. Or maybe those who followed the account didn’t like the constant repetition and retweeting of the same deal. With just about 225,000 followers, Early Bird was definitely not a huge success for Twitter and probably didn’t bring in enough revenue to continue the program. Earlier today, a Twitter spokesperson told Mashable that the company is "taking the learnings from @earlybird, including feedback from users and businesses, and investing that knowledge into our Promoted Products platform to help businesses grow their audience and provide great offers and information to users.”

Why do you think Early Bird didn’t catch on with Twitter’s users? What could Twitter do to make it better? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss