The challenges of Twitter’s plans for premium services for brands
- Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr
Reports today suggest that Twitter is planning to roll-out a range of new premium features that it hopes will appeal to a corporate market. We’ve written before about how brands can use Twitter, and there are many examples of brands who are seeing quantifiable benefits from their use of Twitter. Dell’s $3m in revenue from one Twitter account is just one example. Twitter is an integral part of brand social media strategies and businesses, organisations and even celebrity brands are benefiting from it. Among the chatter about how Twitter might monetise, one option has always stood out - to offer additional, premium services to corporate accounts. This week’s announcements are a step towards this.
In an interview reported in the LA Times, Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, talked about future developments for the social media tool, specifically potential premium features. As the LA Times reports:
[Stone] said the company will introduce commercial accounts for businesses by year end that will “make them better Twitterers.” Stone emphasized that Twitter would remain free for all users, including businesses. But corporate users will have the option of paying for extra features such as analytics, which help businesses measure their online popularity and monitor traffic.
Any move to offer such premium services would obviously have to add real value to those businesses who are using Twitter. The real excitement of Twitter is that different people (and different businesses) are using it for different reasons. From a business and brand perspective, they might be using it for research, word-of-mouth, customer service, new customer acquisition, advertising. The list is endless. Twitter is in an experimental stage at the moment and the number of different uses and applications of the tool is probably as large as the number of businesses using the tool in total.
So any attempt to monetise the site by offering premium services will need to t dechink carefully about how people are currently using the service and, perhaps more importantly, how it will develop and brand use of it will develop.
A good analytics tool is certainly of interest, especially if it offers comprehensive buzz monitoring - helping brands to understand what people are saying about them on Twitter, then to identify these people and connect with them. Providing a tool that will enable brands to engage with people directly through an analytics and engagement tool. However, for any premium service to be of real use I suspect it would need to offer more than this. The clients that we work with at FreshNetworks, for example, would need more pay Twitter for additional services. Each of them would probably want different things, but one that would be common to all of them is access to users. A service that allowed them to identify and then contact Twitter users talking about their brand, market or organisation would have real value. Of course, any distribution of contact details like this would break Twitter’s own terms of service with its users and no doubt alienate them as well.
Premium services for brands on Twitter have the possibility of being of real value. But what these services could be needs some real thinking about…