The number of sites offering ways to make money on Twitter are innumerable. A lot of them are hoax and fishing. I have personally stumbled upon sites offering books on how to make money on Twitter that looked very much like a hoax. The story with spam on Twitter is also widely known by all and is a source of Twitter’s service deterioration. If you ask me, I would say that these are all wrong ways to make money on Twitter. First, they are unethical and second, they are not optimized with the nature of Twitter’s service.

I believe that there is a right way to make money on Twitter. But to be able to do so, one needs to understand how Twitter can be useful for business. The central idea is that Twitter connects people together through words. Since words that are expressed by people are the product of their thoughts, there is a strong correlation between what people tweet about and what they are interested in.

This feature can be used by marketers to find people that might be interested in products or services that they want to promote. I call this first set of people ‘the seed’. Then, the following/follower feature of Twitter helps to find people connected to the initial seed for a wider audience. In this sense, my opinion is that making money on Twitter’s first principle is that it is a matter of promotion.

But this technique is also used by fishers and spammer, so how can the ethical marketer differentiate itself with them? I believe this can be achieved by following the central principles of social networking: relationship building. This is the second principle of making money on Twitter. This is what separates marketers from spammers. Building relationships means devoting time for people while spamming means taking time from people. This is what will generate genuine interest for a product, service or company.

In conclusion, I would like to state that making money on Twitter is an wrong term to use for marketing. Money is made when sales are made and Twitter should be used to lead to those sales.