Dell reveals it has made $6.5m out of Twitter
Earlier this year Dell revealed that it had made $3m out of its Twitter activity, yesterday it gave some briefings and said this figure had risen to $6.5m. Yes that is real money from Twitter.
The $3m figure it revealed in June was $2m made directly and $1m that had come to Dell.com via Twitter. The numbers are picking up now and Dell is seeing strong sales growth both via its original Delloutlet Twitter accounts and by new accounts that have been more recently established in places like Brazil and Canada that has pushed that figure to $6.5m.
The main Delloutlet account @Delloutlet has also seen massive growth leaping from from 640,000 followers to 1,468,249.
Interestingly the Delloutlet account in Canada @DellHomeSalesCA was set up after pressure from Canadian bloggers and Twitter users. Go Canadians. That has generated $150,000 in sales since going live.
More interestingly is Dell’s Twitter operation in Brazil @DellnoBrasil. That Twitter account has generated $800,000 in eight months. As one of the large emerging markets that’s really good news for Dell and also shows strong adoption of social media.
Other facts to come out of yesterday’s briefing were that Dell can now count 3.5m social connections it has with customers via a spread of social networks from Facebook and Twitter, to Flickr and YouTube. Not to mention its crowdsourcing project IdeaStorm.
Some other Ideastorm stats that emerged yesterday:
- 60,000 participants in the IdeaStorm community
- They have contributed 12,743 ideas
- And posted 87,159 comments
- Ideas posted have been promoted 693,670 times in total
- And of those ideas 385 have been implemented
Crowdsourcing is turning into a powerful social tool for Dell that it appears to be engaging in very actively. Suggestions for changes to keyboard layouts to Dell Mini netbooks and launching products for world aids project product #Red have all come via this social avenue.
Richard Binhammer from Dell told me that the PC firm now has between 100-200 people within the business Twittering with some high profile Twitter users like Johnb@Dell on the gaming front, @Dellservergeek on the data centre end and a member of the office of the CTO Matt Domsch @mdomsch for all your high end Linux needs (I have none of these Linux needs in case you were wondering).
There is more here on the Dell site.
[Twitter]
