Earlier this week, the Wall St. Journal reported that Twitter plans to sell premium features, mostly to businesses.
While there are no details on what exactly Twitter plans to offer, there is speculation that it could include a higher quality of service as well as analytics to gain information about traffic and users.
For individuals, Twitter said there are no fees on the horizon. That said, what would you be willing to pay to gain better service or more features from Twitter?
Would you pay for tools to find new followers more easily? If Twitter started to insert contextual advertising within live streams, would you be willing to pay to not have the advertising appear?
And is there anything you would want from Twitter that a third-party is already?
More revenue for Twitter on the way: The company confirms — for the first time we’ve seen, at least — age-old theories that they’ll sell commercial accounts to power users or companies using Twitter.
In exchange for a fee, companies could get “more features” on Twitter, the WSJ reports. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone tells the WSJ that the company recently hired a product manager to help develop those accounts, but doesn’t specify what the extra features will be or when the accounts will launch.
This makes perfect sense. There’s a lot of stuff companies would pay Twitter for, such as a way to verify the company rep’s legitimacy; to more analytics and information about who is reading their Twitter page; to better tracking features to see what people are saying about their company.
What would you pay for an account like this? We could see a lot of companies paying $10 or $20 a month for the service, even for simple tools. But we could also see many companies — Comcast, JetBlue, Starbucks, etc. — paying more than one hundred dollars per month for really good, insightful tools.
Update:
We were able to get in touch with Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, who affirmed that Twitter does plan to offer for-fee commercial features at some point. Key point: Companies and individuals will always be able to use Twitter for free; the for-sale features will be add-ons.
5 Comments
For some point, it's fair that Twitter requests for a reasonable amount of payment when it comes to commercial purposes; however, it's good to find out what exactly those add-ons going to help companies in their businesses, could it be security? user info? Could there be any privacy issue aroused if it includes certain type of tracking features on their potential customers? or mass publicity that'll lead to spams?
However it may be, depends on the effectiveness & price involved. But for now, I like the way it is, and communicating with my clients occasionally with Twitter is good enough to keep things going smoothly. Will be waiting for the service catalogue if Twitter plans any.
I did not vote because there was no $0 option. If I had to pay, I would stop using Twitter.
Thanks,
Nate
I think Twitter can get some money to provide a premium services but not to make it essential for the basic services; plus Twitter is already great as it is now
so it's ok to get some profits
Maybe if there was an incentive of some sort, other I vote for the $0 option
It depends on Twitter's new features, but 10-20$ would be ok!