There’s obviously been a lot of discussion around the plans for Twitter to monetise brands and company usage of the microblogging service.
Robin at We Are Social has a nice write-up of the current situation – as befits a company whose Twitter account has ended up on the front page of Marketing!
And I’ve definitely started having some thoughts about this – the main ones are relief that the monetisation will focus on value-added services, not the current level of access. This will prevent the possibility of brands and individuals being caught in grey areas between classed as people or companies, which is a line being blurred for many people, particularly those likely to be heavy Twitter users.
And I do think that there are ways to offer services and information above what is in the Twittersphere – I like and use a range of monitoring services, but they all currently have certain weaknesses that an official tool might overcome.
My only hope is that Twitter avoids falling into the same hole that Facebook seems to be digging at the moment – trying to force brands into using advertising by increasingly restricting what is allowed even on brand pages. Even with huge growth over the last 12 months (and even this year), it’s still not on a global scale to have the perceived power Facebook has – and if FB keeps becoming harder to work with, I can definitely see an accelerated move to more niche networks, and possibly even back to Myspace et al for brands.
The good thing is that Twitter not on
ly has a lot of ecosystem offerings to keep it honest, but several interesting competitors. Although the likes of Plurk, Identi.ca, Jaiku etc aren’t approaching the scale of Twitter, forgetting to put users first would definitely result in a search to one of the rival services. And don’t forget that Plurk is the number 1 service in Singapore!
Here’s the clarification on the official Twitter blog:
It’s great that both individuals and organizations are finding value in Twitter and there may be ways we can enrich the experience. In fact, we hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year.
However, it’s important to note that whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone – individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. What we’re thinking about is adding value in places where we are already seeing traction, not imposing fees on existing services.