Twitter to cash-in on commercial users with new corporate accounts
Twitter is set to launch paid-for corporate accounts with additional services before the end of the year.
The social network plans to offer companies paid-for services which are not currently available to regular users, however, commercial users will not be forced to pay to use the micro-blogging site.
In an interview with the BBC, Twitter founder Biz Stone, said: “One of the first things we’re going to do explicitly is commercial accounts, [which] is providing a special layer of access.
“Twitter will always be free to everyone whether it is commercial or personal, but you’ll be able to pay for an additional layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account and to get some feedback and analytics to help you become a better twitter.”
Twitter hopes to take advantage of some of its commercial users, which include airlines and retailers.
In addition to launching premium corporate accounts, Stone hinted that the company is interested in setting up partnerships with media companies.
“We also have licensing and syndication possibilities [to make money] in all of our open content,” he said. “The idea that we can give away this real time feed of data to other companies like Google and Bing in order to allow them to create a better experience for searching Twitter.”
The possibilities of media partnerships comes as Twitter has increased its breaking news stories and updates element by adding a “What’s happening?” prompt to get users to engage with each other.
“A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive,” Stone said. “Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering ‘What are you doing?’ with ‘Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee’, at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings.
“Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organising events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more. The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates.”