Twitter Blue: Twitter unveiles Subscription Service to ‘Super Users’, offering Exclusive Features

Twitter Debuts Subscriptions to ‘Super Users’ in New Revenue Push

Premium features of Twitter Blue include ‘undo’ for posts, faster customer service

Twitter Inc. introduced a long-awaited subscription service, providing customers with specialized tweets and post editing as part of a compulsion to reduce social network dependence on advertising revenue.

Called Twitter Blue, the product will cost $ 2.99 a month to get tools that enable you to "reverse" posts before they go public, organize tweets into folders, and easily read long tweets. Subscribers will also receive a quick customer support claims service, they can choose from new app colors and they will be able to change the Twitter app icon on iOS devices.

The subscription model could help Twitter diversify its business at a time when the epidemic has underscored the dangers of relying too much on digital advertising. The company makes more than 85% of its revenue from advertising, and the rest comes from its data delivery business. In the second quarter of last year, as the epidemic pushed for global lockout and led to the cancellation of events, Twitter sales dropped by 19%. Twitter Blue can provide consistent, or minimal, revenue streams.

The product suite is thrown to more than 200 million Twitter users every day, including journalists, social media executives and those who use the site as their main source of news, says Sara Beykpour, a leading subscriber product.

Source: Twitter Inc. 

"Twitter Blue is targeted at customers who work closely with us, our most interested users who are most willing to take their information to the next level," said Beyppour, who declined to quantify the size of the target group. "There is something special about this cohort that we are really learning about."

San Francisco-based Twitter has considered sales for years, but so far it has not gone through internal testing and research. The service is only available in Canada and Australia when it is launched, but Twitter is planning to expand to other markets soon, Bekpour said.

With the new service, users will be able to see long threads in Reader Mode, which show multiple tweets as a long form of content without engagement buttons.

The social network also created a dedicated line to help customers resolve subscriber complaints and give paid users the “postpone-post” option, which will allow them to place a temporary window after publishing a tweet where it can be remembered and edited. The tweets will not be visible to anyone else until that time limit expires.

This is different from the editing button, which many users have been ringing for. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has repeatedly said that such a thing is impossible, and there are concerns that Twitter's ability to quickly spread news can make the editing button dangerous as it will allow people to change the tweet after it has been widely circulated.
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Beyppour said the postponement-sending feature will "help with other usage cases" with the edit button, like typos, adding that the company wants to "start here and get feedback" before looking at other options.

Finally, Twitter would like to expand its subscription service to include additional features or benefits, and the company is researching additional products, Beyppour said. TweetDeck, a free app that allows users to manage multiple feeds from a single dashboard, could go to the "freemium" model, he said, meaning that a basic service will be provided while charging premium or access features.

Some of the Twitter subscriptions were previously reported by Bloomberg, while other details were revealed and posted on twitter by security researcher Jane Manchun Wong.

Source: Twitter Inc.

The company is developing other subscription and payment products that will enable popular users to make money on their social media accounts. A few months ago, Twitter announced a number of creator tools, including an allowance feature that allows users to donate to their followers, and a ticket product so people can charge access to the app's live audio chambers, called Spaces.

One of the money-making schemes the company operates on is a monthly subscription product called Super Follows, which will allow people to charge their fans for special content, such as tweets, newsletters or access to audio chats. The company has not yet released the feature but plans to offer three price levels, for $ 2.99, $ 4.99 and $ 9.99 a month, said Esther Crawford, chief product manager.

Additions can help Twitter compete with other social networks such as Facebook Inc., YouTube for YouTube and Snap Inc.'s Snapchat, which also seeks to attract creators with new revenue-generating products.
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Twitter's recent attempts to release creators' payment options have been partially driven by the epidemic, Crawford said. With people clinging to the home, the company pushed for greater publicity on social media as a way to get them connected to the internet, and that led to many conversations about helping users monetize their digital content.

"There's also this groundbreaking fact that people are really suffering and there's this digital, medium-sized economy still being created," Crawford said. "I think Twitter can play a big role in building that."