Twitter To Launch Paid-For Business Accounts

Twitter founder Biz Stone has confirmed plans for Twitter to launch paid-for business accounts, providing corporate users with additional services to help them track their success on the web. In an interview with the BBC, Stone outlined some of the ways he plans to create revenue from the micro-blogging site.

“People are very curious about exactly how we make our money, and we’re going to be entering into that this year,” he said. “One of the first things we’re going to do explicitly is commercial accounts, and that is providing a special layer of access.

“Twitter will always be free to everyone, whether it’s commercial or personal, but you’ll be able to pay for an additional layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account – get some feedback, get some analytics so you can become a better Twitterer.”

Plans for the corporate accounts were first rumoured in late March. At the time Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann said that the site had several possible uses within a business context, from being used as a marketing or public-relations channel to enabling employees and executives to communicate internally over projects or other issues.

“Despite the fact that Twitter is primarily aimed at individual users in the consumer market, many of those individuals work for companies and ‘tweet’ about business issues, leading businesses to explore how they could best use it,” said Mann in a research note. “If organisations have not defined a public web participation policy, they should do so as quickly as possible.”

Since then the company’s focus on encouraging businesses to use Twitter has intensified, with the introduction of user guides for both governments and businesses and, more recently, integration with professional network LinkedIn for combined status updates.

In his interview Stone also mentioned other ways that the site might make money, including licensing and syndication of tweets. “We could 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,” he explained.

In September Twitter also revised its terms of service, adding allowances for online advertising and more clarity about content ownership, APIs and spam. Stone explained the company wants to “keep our options open” for incorporating alternative revenue streams in the future.

In other news, Twitter has changed its “What are you doing?” tagline above the status box to “What’s happening?”. In a blog post, Stone explains the change is designed to reflect the changing way in which people use the service.

“People, organisations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, ‘What’s happening?’ … The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates.”

However not all companies are embracing the idea of their employees spending their days on Twitter. According to a report by IT staffing solutions firm Robert Half Technology in October, more than half of the 1,400 CIOs they surveyed block sites such as Facebook and Twitter completely from employee access, viewing them as an unnecessary distraction.

Earlier this year Twitter secured funding of $100 million (£62 million), which would value the firm company hopes to reach a billion users by 2013.