Twitter Launching Paid Business Accounts | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Launching Paid Business Accounts

telegraph.co.uk

29 pointstsestrich18 comments

This is a very good idea. I've already noticed small businesses messaging me back when I mention their services and products; clearly, they're taking some time out of their day to manage their Twitter reputation.

Given the breadth of different companies I know have been involved with Twitter (from small local restuarants to boutique culinary appliance manufacturers to Comcast), there must be thousands of companies who would pay for this service, especially if Twitter can lower the barrier to entry for them and provide metrics so that company Twitter advocates can gin up some kind of ROI.

It seems like Twitter is beating GetSatisfaction at its own game.

Could probably take Yelp's business too. I know I'm much more likely to Tweet about something than write a review on Yelp.

Couldn't happen to a nicer couple of companies.

Was this sarcastic? Honestly I have no idea about these two except that Getsatisfaction got some bad press from 37signals etc.

No, it wasn't. Both companies make money by harnessing unpaid volunteers and using their work to prey on small businesses.

Bingo. Access to stats and a "verified" marker would be huge for businesses.

I just hope they don't have "levels" of paid accounts based on followers for example. A single $20-$50 per year would make sense to me. But I imagine whichever route they choose, and no matter what cost, they'll sell anyway.

I'm just thinking that for any larger company (think Fortune 500), $20-$25 would be a rounding error. I bet they'll charge their premium accounts significantly more ($hundreds at least). Their "analytics" would have to be pretty kick ass though for any company to take the next step and pay for the service.

I think the key part of it is the "verified" part of the deal.

They could provide a single PHP+ImageMagick bar chart and if the "analytics" shaved 15 minutes a week off some marcom person's workload, it would be worth thousands of dollars.

#1 rule of startup pricing: CHARGE MORE.

<i>"#1 rule of startup pricing: CHARGE MORE."</i>

Exactly. There's no reason why the paid twitter business accounts should be priced at the $20/mo. level. Maybe for verification alone that makes sense, but twitter could easily charge $100/mo. or more.

I totally agree with you. I think Twitter is basing the pricing decision off avoiding blowback from charging $1,000 a month from the people who will under no circumstances pay Twitter so much as $2 a month.

My first thought is that pricing should based on the number of followers;

0 - 999= $9/mo 1k-10k = $29/mo 10-20k = $39/mo 21-30k = $49/mo 31k-50k = $59/mo 51k-100k = $79/mo 100.01k-300k = $129/mo 300.01k-1mm = $259/mo

For Dell with $60B in revenue, $50/year would be 0.000000083 % of annual revenue. You cannot call it a "rounding error". You need to invent a new term to describe the negligibility of that fraction.

Huh?! I used to pay Yahoo Mail ~$20/year just so that I dint have to see banner ads on the right hand side (This was before GMail became my primary email).

For the value that Twitter Business Accounts will provide to businesses, a basic fee of hundred of dollars per month sounds reasonable, and then added features could cost extra. I know I would pay if I were a Dell or a JetBlue.

"Twitter, which is valued at around $1 billion, has yet to settle on a business model for the service..."

Yes, the irony is thick.

I'm assuming Twitter will design a way to charge large companies significantly higher fees and less for small companies and startups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com