When free turns to paid. Twitter for Brands (business).

Over the last couple of days the news is out of the box, that Twitter is considering charging brands (this is still to be adequately defined) for using twitter and possible related services.

Those of us that have been tweeting and observing for a while have wondered what Twitter’s first play would be in commercialising this empowering service.

We all know it can’t be free forever (sadly), but exactly how it would first change its positioning was always hotly debated but never clear.

Our brand your twitter.

So why a brand? Well obviously some of the larger ‘personalities/celebrities’ on Twitter use a lot of Twitter resources, e.g. @GuyKawasaki and his alltop blasts, @stephenfry with his huge following and many fully blown commercial brands.

Whereas a business by definition is not necessarily an individual and many could hide behind the distinction.

Questions and comments are raging across the blogosphere as to what / who would constitute a brand, and how exactly would they be targeted. The obvious assumption is heavy users who are benefitting in promoting their brand or utilising Twitter (either directly or via API) would be charged in some form of user pays model.

Would the Zappos page of all their staff who use twitter (much which isn’t about shoes) become commercial use of the API?

What about @774melbourne – an ABC local radio station that was providing a huge community service tweeting #bushfire information this last week? Would they be considered a commercial brand worth charging for?

The charging model sounds good in theory, of course it may fuel an exodus to ‘the next big thing’, but unlikely. The savvy ‘Brand Marketers’ are obviously converting it into eyeballs, and attention to their brand, so it should be safe to assume they would pay. There are conversions from that attention to commercial benefit of their products / services.

It does depend on how much you would have to pay and what you get in return.

With a paid model though comes an expectation of service and delivery. Will twitter be able to talk down the performance issues (even though these days they are rarer) to a paying audience?

If your brand is benefitting by their product, then by association does that mean if Twitter starts ‘fail whaling’ your brand is adversely affected? Given Twitter is growing rapidly and is generally handling the load now, as it continues to grow will we see more episodes of outages and technical faults?

Free / Beta sites can use many excuses for service delivery problems; paid sites have no such luxury.

While providing some possible statistics and other tools, they also would need to have real value not just meaningless statistical counters.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and how the community responds.

If nothing else it might get rid of the scammers and spammers who like to pay little to bombard users.

Well that’s what Ireckon!