Tech and Web NEWS

Twitter commercial accounts: Planning to charge companies/brands for using the micro-blogging website.

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:February 11, 2009

Twitter Personal brands Vs Corporate brands; who should pay?
Is Twitter really a business or is it just an online phenomenon?

I have been a long time (3 months) twitter user – it has helped me connect w/ old and new friends in many ways. The question about monetization is really not relevant – the service solves a pain for many people and for different reasons. The money will naturally follow…

Co-founder Biz Stone told Marketing magazine, ‘We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.’ He would not be drawn on the level of charges. it could also create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool. Stone insisted Twitter would not charge individual users.

How about ‘Pay2Follow’: charge ppl a minimal fee to follow their fav celebs and take a cut?

And what about publications? They’re businesses too…

Twitter needs to make money at some point which is fair enough. Charging brands could be one area although I would suggest promoting their search tool and associating some PPC to this area might be a quicker revenue stream.

Top twitter user who made it possible, where twitter is today:

@Jack Dorsey
@Biz Stone
@noah
@crystal
@Amarendra
@Jeremy
@Evan Williams
@Dom Sagolla
@Tony Stubblebine
@Adam Rugel
@Florian
@rayreadyray
@Tim Roberts
@Blaine Cook
@rabble

In another news, Twitter co-founder – and former CEO – Jack Dorsey is stepping in as an advisor to Ustream.tv, the popular live video community site.

I think, Twitter is worth every bit of the hype they receive. Those who do not understand it’s value aren’t relevant to new media technologies anyway.

For Twitter to make this work simply, they should add an opt in premium account version that sits within Twitter, then anyone can have the premium version if they want, be it corporate, celeb or individual. Add extra features for the premium version, such as filtering, allowing you to use key words to filter incoming tweets, or ways to group your followers or those you’re following, or ways to delve into the demographics of your followers, their locations, their amount of activity, their gender etc. All useful stuff for a corporate marketing department and something they’d happily pay for!

An alternative business model would be to treat Twitter as any other media owner and sell targeted ads within the stream, like Facebook do. Most users will accept some advertising as a necessary evil if it allows a good service to remain free, and targeted, relevant ads can actually be a good thing.

But, I’m not so sure that advertising is the way to go with twitter, or with many sites & services like these. I feel adding an extra layer of services worth paying for is a better approach, as long as it doesn’t alienate or lessen the initial free service.

Think of Flickr or Wordpress as good examples of this, the free services are excellent, but the pro or upgraded services offer additional benefits.

or, I suggest a simple maximum number of tweets allowed per month before you have to pay a small amount to upgrade to more tweets. Offering multiple account options would also be wise to keep users content with what they are paying for. This is exactly how most mobile companies offer sms and texting, which is easily connected to Twitter updates. Hopefully, Twitter will stay away from the mobile companies…

Like this article! ‹ After Shashi Seth, General Wesley Clark Twitter’s Jack Dorsey Joins Ustream.tv Advisory Board! Marsh & McLennan earnings per share fall 6% in quarter! ›
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