Is Twitter missing a trick?

Twitter. It's my favourite social network. I find it amusing, positive, engaging and useful.

I got thinking the other day about how on earth Twitter should attempt to retain all of these qualities but also try to make some dollar. Adverts in social media remain pretty uncool. Personally I've never clicked on a promoted Tweet, I don't take great exception to them, but it's all pretty passive and old school. Which got me thinking. Maybe Twitter is missing a trick with promoted Tweets. Maybe they are a red herring. It seems to me that Twitter has a far more powerful commercial story if they sell insight. By that I mean insight into the people who are on Twitter. I don't mean anything too specific, like my email address or home contact details. No, I'm talking about demographic data. For example, let's take @therealprmoment. We have just over nearly 16,000 followers on Twitter. How many of these are robots? How many of these are PR people? How does my click through/ re-tweet rate compare to other similar magazines? How many of my followers are logged in/ active? What is the geographical spread of my followers? And imagine if all this info was available in close to real time. I reckon brands would find that pretty useful. Brands use twitter and in many cases they use it very successfully. Would brands pay for this type of insight? You bet I would! And so would my advertisers. I'm not particularly suggesting that Twitter should give up on the promoted Tweet idea, just suggesting another revenue stream.