Where did I hear about this first, on twitter of course! thanks to Matt Ryan
In this piece in Marketing Magazine, it would appear Twitter is working out ways to monetize it’s service.
Co-founder Biz Stone told Marketing: ‘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.’
I appreciate Twitter needs a revenue stream, adverts certainly wouldn’t work, they’d drive people away, so charging corporations is a good approach, if they’re using twitter for commercial gain, why shouldn’t Twitter benefit? But how do you distinguish between an individual or a company or brand. Celebrities are brands, but they’re individuals, CEO’s may be the voice for a corporate, but they too are individuals! What about non-profits or high profile bloggers etc, simply setting a threshold on follower numbers wouldn’t help either.
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’s marketing department and something they’d happily pay for!