Dell has pulled in more than $6.5 million from its Twitter accounts.

The Year of Twitter may be coming to an end, but the potential for making money from the social media portal has still yet to be fully realized. Companies all over the world are reaching out to Twitter’s 18 million users and more and more of those companies are seeing revenues rise as a result. Social media’s continued integration into every aspect of our lives is creating a limitlessly lucrative channel for businesses to reach potential and current customers, handing out deals and coupons as well as taking care of customer service and creating brand awareness.

A great example of Twitter’s potential can be seen by looking at Dell (@DellOutlet). The 3rd largest PC maker began using Twitter 2 years ago to update followers of special deals as well has handle customer support. This June Dell announced that they had seen over $3 million in revenue generated from Twitter. At the time of this post Dell had more than doubled that figure to over $6.5 million. Not bad for using a free service.

Dell reaches out to more than 1.5 million followers (about the population of Pheonix, Arizona) several times a day, making sure that none of them can miss a deal that Dell may be running on their web site. Best of all, those 1.5 million followers all voluntarily chose to be continuously updated by Dell, meaning that, for the most part, they are all potential customers. That’s part of what makes Twitter so great. Pushing out deals to millions of people that aren’t interested in your product can be a waste of time and money. Twitter eliminates that problem for businesses and lets them focus their efforts on real sales leads.

And the benefits of Twitter keep growing at a rate that can’t be overlooked if you’re responsible for marketing your company’s products. Currently Twitter has only a fraction of the users that Facebook has (Facebook boasts an incredible 350 million users compared to Twitter’s 18 million), meaning that the potential for growth is still enormous. Also, Twitter, as well as other forms of social media, are now integrated into Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game console. This creates a new way for companies to reach the more than 2 million people that have already used the social media services on their TV through Xbox Live.

Even bigger, though, is the integration of tweets into Google’s search results, called Google Social Search. Google now scours the web for relevant and recent Twitter posts and displays them in your search results. The results are updated in real-time and those tweets that are being sent out are gaining an incredibly large boost in potential views and clicks. The power of Google combines with Twitter to make the social media portal a must-have for businesses. I’ve personally seen the benefits of this partnership in action. Just yesterday I posted a tweet for one of our clients that had the word money in it. Just minutes later a coworker of mine came over to show me that he had just tried out Google’s social search capabilities and searched for the keyword money. Behold, the tweet that was sent out to the company’s followers was on the first page of Google’s search results with a link to their web site. That was impressive to say the least.

Twitter will continue to grow in several ways and will become more ingrained into our daily lives. 2009 may have been the year of Twitter, but 2010 will be the year that companies use it to its full potential and really profit from it.

2009 has been the year of Twitter, and really many other forms of social media. 2010 is set to be just as big for social media, if not bigger. Up until a few weeks ago our Facebook news feeds and those beloved tweets were pretty much limited to our computers and mobile phones. Now, though, Xbox has integrated both of those social networking sites into Xbox Live, a social networking portal in it’s own right with over 8 million male users ages 18 to 34. Gamers can access their Facebook and Twitter accounts directly from the TV set, something that more and more poeple could start to get use to in the next year or so.

With the number of homes with HD televisions rising (High Def sets were among the hottest sellers this Black Friday) and a large number of homes having high-speed internet social media may begin to make its move very soon. Depending on how well people adapt to this “new” social media channel we might be tweeting about The Office directly on our TVs while we’re watching it.

Imagine, by this time next year you could be watching the news and at the same time have a small box on the side of the screen with real-time facebook updates and tweets coming directly to your TV. You could be watching a movie and chatting with friends spread across the globe at the same time.

Social media on our TVs will also provide businesses with an incredible opportunity to drastically change their marketing strategies and where they spend their money. It will be very interesting to see how this all shapes up.

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