Sustainability of Twitter Business Model and Competitive Advantage

3. Sustainability of Twitter business model and competitive advantage

Company’s aim to obtain and maintain sustainable business model (SBM) and competitive advantages (SCA) as long as possible and Twitter is certainly one of them. In addition, SBM and SCA are considered as important intangible assets that help company to create value that is hard to imitate and not easily substitutable (Ogrean, Herciu & Belascu 2009).

A. Sustainable business model

SBM focus on adding value to stakeholders; manage stakeholder relations, environment and society because the purpose of the sustainability business model “does not only response to stakeholder claims but also meet the changing characteristic of societal demand” (Bilgin 2009). Twitter obtains SBM through competitiveness, availability, reliability, innovation and knowledge management.

a. Competitiveness

Twitter established their business with a differentiation strategy that compared with rivals such as Facebook, My Space, Google Plus and so on. Twitter created the quality of versatility through a different method of communication. Twitter is a more active form of social communication in which user may not know one another but communicate often (Tagtmeier 2009). In fact, Twitter allows user to transmit information to a lots of strangers as well as friends. While facebook give users friends, users in Twitter can become friends with one another or simply be a “follower”. Moreover, Twitter has created efficient fee for users and advertisers through “promoted tweets” in 2010. This strategy attracted Best Buy, Starbucks, Virgin American and Bravo to take part in Twitter web site (Mark & Parker 2011).

b. Availability

There are some positive characteristics of Twitter. In fact, Twitter can be described as an ease of access portal, simple