On Jul 16, 1:14 pm, Stuart <stut...@gmail.com> wrote: > Twitter have a business plan, we're just not worthy enough to know all > the details. What we know so far is that they're planning to launch a > premium account type with a bunch of tools to aid brand and engagement > tracking.
I've got news for you ... Twitter itself is woefully behind the curve on monitoring / marketing / analytics technologies. Third parties are springing up daily with offerings in this area, many of them involving cutting-edge natural language processing. Twitter could obviously invest in these areas, but I'm not sure why they would, rather than focusing on stability, scalability and security of the underlying platform and messaging systems. Perhaps one way to "monetize" Twitter would be to implement a per- follower charge, say, free up to 2000 followers, then a small monthly fee up to 10,000, a larger fee up to 100,000 and so on. I haven't seen follower count distribution data recently, but I'd say that people with more than 2000 followers are rare and are probably using Twitter as a "push marketing / sales" platform in some sense. Of course, I'm at around 3500 followers at the moment, so I would be paying a monthly fee and would need to justify it as a business expense (or block about 1500 people, which isn't out of the question) ;-)
