Twitter goes Freemium.. and finally:)

Twitter has become a buzz word , where once having 1000 odd followers would have gotten brands to chase you as influencers today you would need 20k+ followers. After deferring attempts at being acquired, and being constantly questioned by press, media, experts etc... Twitter finally has unveiled premium accounts and that is the title of my post.

Let me explain what Freemium means. Free + premium = Freemium. In Web 2.0 world , these are the new business models followed. Organisations struggle to build a base of loyal customers, a sort of cult following. In fact the valuation of any company in web 2.0 world would be as follows

Value = Customer base * Customer Lifetime Value.

So to have a higher valuation you would want to enhance either your customer base or increase lifetime value ( CLV).

So the mantra is like this, offer a vanilla service free on the net, get customer hooked onto it and then when your customer base has become substantial , add in more features to the vanilla service and charge a premium . LinkedIn, Flicker etc have gone the premium way. Why forget gmail. Gmail also has a freemium business model. Now Twitter has finally entered the arena.

So coming back to twitter. Twitter has just unveiled its premium account types. They came in 4 categories each differing at the level of extra services and the rates you pay. An obvious service they could offer with premium accounts was extending the word limit, because most tweeters feel restricted with the word limit. Now each of the four levels have differing word limits. One thing I had not thought of for premium accounts was that buying each package gets you random followers. Some packages also offer random celebrity followers and embellishments.. Now it seemed absurd to me when I read it first. I sincerely hope that would a rumour. If not then Twitter would probably lose it hard core fan following and would ultimately lead to brand dilution. Also a recent thing I noticed on my twitter page, nowadays there are ads to promote twitters own products like twitter search, widgets etc. Twitter definitely has a long way to go!

Read the complete article here.


http://www.bbspot.com/News/2009/03/twitter-unveils-premium-accounts.html