Is Twitter a business? You betcha! says CEO Dick Costolo

Twitter , in an interview at D9 (video posted below):

It took three years to send the first billion tweets, and we now send a billion tweets every six days.”

So, Mossberg asked, “Are you a business? And if not, when will you be one?”

“We’re a remarkably successful business,” Costolo responded, appending these examples:

Over 80% of all the advertisers who have advertised on Twitter come back and renew and advertise again on Twitter.t

The average engagement rate — where an engagement is a click, a reply or a retweet — is orders of magnitude bigger, better than traditional digital media advertising.

Volkswagen ran an ad campaign with us for their new VW Beetle. It was a promoted tweet, and a promoted trend. The promoted tweet had an engagement rate of 52%. So of all the people who saw the ad, more people engaged with it than didn’t.

That’s just unheard of.

Here are video excerpts from the interview, via All Things Digital—