34 Twitter accounts, some of which post links to special offers. The company claims 600,000 followers. Once you know these numbers, it doesn't seem crazy that Dell racked up $3 million in sales through Twitter so far. More than a million of those dollars came in within the past 6 months.
Three million is nothing to Dell, which posted $12.3 billion in revenue during Q1 of 2009.
Dell's press release quotes Gartner analyst Allen Weiner on Twitter's potential as a sale-maker:
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. 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.
Most of the sales have come through the Dell Outlet account, which tweets only 6 to 10 times per week. Most Twitterati would think that too low a frequency. Why would anyone follow you? That line of thinking leads to a good question: If Dell can make $3 million by tweeting a few times per week, what would happen if the company tweeted its specials a few times per day? Think how little it would cost to put one employee on the task. Hey, I'd do it. Just saying.