• Reuters, Friday, June 12, 2009 3:15 PM

Dell on Thursday reported that its Twitter followers have brought the company more than $3 million in sales by clicking through to its Web sites to make purchases. The company has been posting tweets for about two years now and tracks sales with proprietary software.

However, as Reuters points out, $3 million in sales over two years is "a pittance" for Dell, which posted $12.3 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2009, alone. That said, yesterday's report marks Dell as one of the first examples of how companies might profit from Twitter, which currently does not charge for such benefits.

"We're going to watch it over time to make sure it's tracking at the right level," said Lionel Menchaca, Dell's chief blogger. "It is trending upward and that's what we're going to be looking at overall." Dell posts 6 to 10 times a week to its DellOutlet account, which is where the majority of its Twitter sales have come from. Account manager Stephanie Nelson says that most posts include a coupon or a link to a sale, and about half of the posts are Twitter-exclusive deals. The PC maker has about 600,000 followers.

Gartner analyst Allen Weiner thinks Dell's success could provide a model for Twitter to make money. "Certainly one of the ways Twitter can begin to think of itself as a money-making operation is to facilitate a lot of these things, build it as part of the infrastructure," Weiner said. "So, if you're a company, you can pay Twitter a certain amount of money and they can directly distribute coupons on your behalf, or clear transactions."

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