Twitter is Movin’ on up!
Recently I spoke at the OMMA Social Conference on a panel discussing possible business models for Twitter; a highly relevant topic given that a week beforehand Twitter announced hiring a Director of Business Development. “Finally,” I thought to myself. “Twitter’s going to start taking its expansion seriously. Maybe I won’t see as many fail whales.”
The four of us on the business model panel at OMMA had diverse points of view and different plans for the future of Twitter, and those have been well-documented elsewhere. My business model was built on the idea that, as a Twitter user, I wouldn’t want Twitter to change very much. As a Twitterholic, however, I did not want Twitter to change at all, and therein lay the foundation for my business model.
Twitter needs to capitalize on its addiction-inducing capabilities. As laid out to awesome effect by Rohit Bhargava, Twitter has stages of acceptance, and while it would be unwise to rely on new adopters to invest in Twitter’s livelihood, there is a group of core users that, in my opinion, would gladly support Twitter as a conduit of direct communication to the community they’ve grown within the Twitterverse.
My business model postulates that after a Twitter user has issued (not received) 100 “tweets,” they would be cut off from tweeting for the rest of the month–they could still receive tweets, but not send them, unless they paid a $5 fee. Upon payment, the user would be able to tweet at will for the rest of the month, and this process would repeat each month. This would keep the fee optional, and assuming most people don’t usually tweet the same amount from month to month–for example, many entities who tweeted in abundance during election season might not tweet as much since then, and wouldn’t be taxed as if they were not consistently heavy users. New Twitter users, except for spam accounts, aren’t going to tweet enough to break that limit, and therefore will not be charged. However, people could elect to give $60 upfront to Tweet freely for an entire year. This way we build Twitter’s future based on small commitments from many people, rather than large commitments from just a few companies, which other proposed Twitter business models rely on.
Hey, Obama’s campaign succeeded with this mindset, so why not Twitter too? In my honest opinion, relying on corporate Twitter accounts is definitely not the way to go, but that might turn out to be the route that Twitter takes. To be continued….
