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How I would Monetize Twitter

I’m of the opinion that Twitter should be a no Brainer to monetize, using the Free for 90% of users, Pay for “Pro” Accounts.

Most twitter Users are never going to need the features that those of us using Twitter for Business and evangelism need.

PermaLinks

Unpaid Twits don’t care about the SEO factor of twitter, so Using a TinyURL or Twitter Short URL that does a 302 Temporary Redirect would not impact them.

Pro Users could post their own URL’s, and any Long URL they post would get a 301 Permanent Redirect, which would let users keep the link authority, and brand that goes with their links.

URL’s on their Twitter Page

Similar to the above, or the way MySpace does URL’s obfuscated URL for UnPaid Users, and Full URL’s for Pro Accounts.

Non-Follower Replies

UnPaid Users don’t generally need a large number of Messages to Users who aren’t following them.  So I would put a quota on @’s to users who aren’t following you, with unlimited @’s to “Pro” users.

Pro Users would get a Larger possibly unlimited number of @’s to Non-Followers.

Multi-User Accounts:

Because Pro Users may represent multiple products, just like RSS feeds a Pro User could have sub accounts which do 2 things.

1. Follow Root: where you could follow all of the Sub accounts of a Pro User.

2. Follow Sub": where you would follow only the Sub Account you choose.

This would allow me to follow a “Person” or “Company” but they could also follow a product, or region, so that you only got as many tweets as you wanted, or only the ones relevant to you.

E-Mail News Letters:

Paid users should be able to send e-mail news letters twice a month to their followers who have opted-in to receive communication from the Pro user.  This would allow Pro Users to send a message larger than 140 characters and in many cases Users would be happy to get an e-mail from Jake Ludington, Gary Vee, or Chris Pirillo.

This would be a “Premium” feature likely based on the number of followers, but I would think this is a $1000 a year product.

Celebrity Accounts:

So what do you do with Britney Spears?  People Join Twitter to Follow her, so I propose that Twitter basically says if you have X number of followers you are a Celebrity and that gets you some additional features which are exclusively for Twitter Users with more than 20k users.  Things like threaded replies on their Twitter page, so you could see all the responses to a tweet. 

“Sort” for followers by Most Active, Most Replied to, Most shared followers.

I think if twitter would do these small things, they could become immensely profitable with little negative impact on its users, and with support of its power users.

-- Brandon Wirtz

Tags: Britney Spears, Chris Pirillo;, Gary Vee;, Jake Ludington;, Twitter Page;, Twitter;, USD;, year product;
Filed in: Industry News