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By Brian Chappell

The twitter train is pulling up, are you on board yet? Twitter is one of the most revolutionary messaging systems to come out in my opinion since AOL Instant Messenger back in 1997. It allows groups of users to simultaneously engage in conversations all at the same time, similar to being in a “chat room” in AOL. As a marketer this can be a golden tool if utilized properly for personal reputation management reasons.

Many underground conversations go on within Twitter that never make it to the blogosphere or news sites. It can be a dynamite location for link bait ideas, breaking stories, and general topics you might not think about on a daily basis. You might even find yourself obtaining clientèle through it. I really could go on and on with what you could do with Twitter.

It has been a long awaited and long talked about prospect but it looks like Twitter is finally letting us all know at least one way that they plan to make money. To literally no one’s surprise it will be through ads that Twitter calls “Promoted Tweets”.

The New York Times reports

Twitter will unveil on Tuesday a much-anticipated plan for making money from advertising, finally answering the question of how the company expects to turn its exponential growth into revenue.

The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.

Before we get into the changes that Twitter has made to its iOS and Android apps, it’s important to consider just how many people actually use the official Twitter experience over third party providers like HootSuite and others. I found some ancient statistics (over a year old) which claim 42% of Twitter users used unofficial apps but that was not looking at mobile solely. Reliable statistics in these areas can be hard to come by for sure.

With mobile use exclusively this kind of data is even harder to track down. Regardless of who is using what though, it’s likely that Twitter is more interested in everyone using native Twitter mobile apps moving forward which further indicates their march to limit third party development around the platform. If the latest tweaks to the mobile experience are any indicator then that is a fair guess.

Twitter just celebrated its fifth birthday. The blog post over at Twitter celebrating this ‘event’ has a nice video (see below, it’s worth the look just to see Snoop Dog’s ‘wake and bake’ reference to Martha Stewart … classic). The Twitter post also has some statistics that, of course, come from the nest itself so we can set the stage with how Twitter feeds the hype.

Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets. While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day. All of this momentum and growth often pales in comparison to a single compassionate Tweet by a caring person who wants to help someone in need.