Twitter's Quiet Reinvention

It's been an eventful period at Twitter, where in the space of a year it has survived internal strife and an external threat to emerge more popular and stronger (cascading bug aside) than any time in its history. It has now 140-million active monthly users (up 40% since last September) who now send over 400 million tweets daily making them an advertisers dream. Unlike other social media companies, this has been achieved without sacrificing its distinctive look or alienating its users and serves as an ideal example to other social media companies.
Since its founding in 2006 Twitter has always had haphazard way of doing business; as evident by the lack of a commercial strategy, but its intimate, addictive platform has ensured that it has always had talented engineers and developers, loyal users and plenty of money from eager investors.
However by early 2011 growth had slowed following a period of stagnation and speculation abounded that its directors had no strategic direction. Matters can to the forefront in May 2011, where following the acquisition of UberTwitter, EchoFon and a number of other Twitter-related affiliates by key rival UberMedia; Twitter faced a mini crisis and was forced to acquire TweetDeck, a key affiliate for $40 million-$50 million in cash and shares, almost double its valuated price, to avoid been put in a difficult position.
This event served as a wakeup call for Twitter and it responded by instigating some much needed changes.

The first of these changes was an engineering overhaul in which it redesigned and rebuilt its infrastructure from the ground up to add much needed stability to its service.

According to Twitter's vice president of engineering Mazen Rawashdeh this has seen "at least 99.96 percent" reliability, more "often 99.
99 percent" during the past six months.

Twitter has also instigated one of the most sophisticated revenue generation schemes of any social media platform and it included: Promoted Tweets -This is Twitter's main revenue generating program and it involves companies such as Starbucks, Virgin America and Red Bull paying for promotional tweets to appear in the Twitter Search results. Operating in a similar manner to Googles's Ad-Words program, advertisers pay anything from a few cents to a few dollars everything a user either clicks, retweets, replies to or marks the promoted tweet as a favourite.
Promoted Trends - Companies pay thousands of dollars and are granted 'Exclusive' status to have their trends prominently featured at the very top of the 'Trending Topics' list. Search engine Feeds - Search engine companies like Yahoo, Bing and Yandex, a Russian search engine pay Twitter millions of dollars in revenue to secure the rights to publish live tweets on any trending topic. It's a win-win deal, as it brings more users to Twitter and provides search engine users with fresh data about all the latest developments.

Promoted Account - Companies can promote themselves to potential followers on a cost-per-follow basis at a cost of 50 cents to $5 per follower.

It took a mini crisis for it to respond, but following its quiet reinvention Twitter is now currently worth $10 billion and has become one of the most respected digital companies operating today.