Twitter paid accounts & finding the feature that will maintain Twitter's loveliness…

With some excitement about confirmation that paid pro Twitter accounts will be rolled out sometime in the vague future, I got to thinking about what features might be useful.

Right now I personally have no need to pay for increased Twitter functionality but if I was a ‘power user’ there might be additional functionality I would pay for.

Existing third party features for Twitter that could be made ‘official’

There are loads of features that might be useful to power users, but lots of them are handled by various third party tools such as:

• Autofollowing people (like TweetLater)
• Sending automated direct messages (like TweetLater)
• Sending automated updates based on search terms (like TwitterHawk)
• Managing multiple Twitter accounts (like HootSuite)
• Multiple users per account (like HootSuite)

Most of the above features I have no use for, but if I was a power user with a global marketing plan I can see how they could come in handy.

Statistics and analytic tools for Twitter

The main functionality I can see people paying for is statistics, because that kind of data / functionality can only be provided by Twitter. What kind of stats might be useful?

• Number of visits to profile page / individual updates
• Most Retweeted Content
• Most clicked on links & their containing updates
• Search terms used to find updates, referring sites and other standard web stats

Easier maintaining of Twitter followers

A feature I would like to have access to is making a yes/no decision about following people. Right now, I get email notifications about people who follow me. It’s disruptive to check out each one as they come in, so they build up and I do them in batches. But it’s time consuming.

There are sites like Friend or Follow and Twitter Karma which make it easy to see my non reciprocated follows – but they show all of them. Because Twitter offers you the option to follow but no option not to follow, people I have already made a decision about show up in that list.

What I want to see is a list of the non reciprocated people who are following me, by date, that I have not made a decision about yet. With follow yes/no options and an ability on the same page to expand their details to show bio and last 5 updates.

You could also see a list of people you had decided not to follow, and a list of people you follow.

Now imagine an official Twitter tool which did all of the above. Would that be worth paying for? One location for all features, and improved confidence in the tool.

The secret ingredient to maintain Twitter’s integrity

I think the biggest feature on a pro Twitter account is one that hasn’t been figured out yet. A feature which would allow for businesses to market their wares on Twitter without compromising the integrity of Twitter.

If Twitter keeps going the way it is now, with businesses and marketers using auto follows, automated searches, auto updates, auto dm’s and the like described above, we may all find ourselves either swimming in a sea of advertising or aggressively culling our followers back to our closest friends – and even then there are two problems 1) even our nearest and dearest might still be auto marketing and 2) it kind of defeats the purpose of connecting with people on Twitter.

I’ve already been thinking about this on Pat Phelan’s post about Twitter marketing (my comment here).

Look at FaceBook for a moment – it has separated out how users interact with people and businesses. This was a wise decision and allows much greater options for the future of marketing on FaceBook.

What could Twitter implement to protect us from a relentless tide of marketing, but allow businesses to interact with people? It would be great to be heading toward a future on Twitter where regular users continue to use Twitter as is, but businesses sign up for a paid account to gain access to marketing tools.

What about a pro business feature which inserted business updates, marked as such, into the streams of people who’s content has been algorithmically deemed contextually appropriate? The algorithm would also protect from over saturation of marketing stuff. While at the same time getting more ruthless with autofollows & auto messaging of any kind, and possibly frowning on marketing in regular updates with a thumbs up / down system on updates to allow Twitter to monitor for abuse.

Your feature suggestions?

The above idea is only one of, I’m sure, potentially millions of approaches. What do you reckon? Comments welcomed with open arms

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.