The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Media Technology Twitter

Twitter ponders a paid membership tier for power users

Author

By John Glenday | Reporter

March 24, 2017 | 2 min read

Twitter is considering the introduction of a paid subscription package to its membership options in a bid to open an important new revenue stream for the social media platform.

Despite becoming the go-to social network of choice for journalists and presidents Twitter has struggled to make a profit, prompting it to reach out to users with a series of surveys to gauge how receptive people might be to laying down their hard earned for the privilege of tweeting.

In return for a monthly fee businesses and tweetaholics would receive access to a souped-up version of Tweetdeck, offering additional functionality for the management of accounts. This would group together high-end functions such as alerts, trends and activity analysis, analytics, composition and posting tools within one intuitive dashboard.

In a statement Twitter explained: “We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people’s Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make Tweetdeck even more valuable for professionals.”

The measure has been prompted by a flat lining in user numbers at the service which has led to a concurrent decline in advertising rates – despite the advertising market as a whole growing voraciously.

If it does go ahead with the endeavor Twitter won’t have the market all sewn up however, with third party rivals such as SocialFlow and HootSuite having offered a similar service for years.

The service has been distracted in recent months developing a new suite of tools to root out and ban members advocating violence.

Media Technology Twitter

More from Media

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +