Social Media and Marketing

Twitter is planning to launch paid-for commercial accounts, which would provide corporate users with additional services to those that are freely available on the microblogging service.

Published: 23 Nov 2009

Twitter is planning to launch paid-for commercial accounts, which would provide corporate users with additional services to those that are freely available on the microblogging service.

In an interview with the BBC, Stone said Twitter will begin offering the commercial services this year.

Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, said the company was close to launching corporate accounts that would help the the popular microblogging site begin to generate revenues.

“This takes advantage of some of the commercial use of Twitter we’ve seen from businesses like airlines and big box stores,” he said. “We want to present to them a layer of features that allows them to become better at Twitter, show them some of the analytics.”

Privately held Twitter has a valuation of around $1 billion after raising an additional $100m in new funding in September, but has yet to generate substantial revenues.

“One of the first things we’re going to do is explicitly is commercial accounts and that 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 to get some freed back to get some analytics to help you become a better Twitter,” Stone said.

Stone also talked about possible syndication and said that Twitter was also interested in partnerships with media companies. Stone said, “We also have licensing and syndication possibilities [to make money] in all of our open content. 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.”

For more information about how corporates are using social media attend
EyeforTravel’s Social Media Strategies for Travel 2010, March 24-25, San Francisco - http://events.eyefortravel.com/social-media/