Twitter Shuts Down TwatterKeeper. HootSuite Targets SMB's with New Freemium Model. The much-adored social media management platform HootSuite made clear how it intends to make money yesterday when it announced that the service is moving to a freemium model. The company says that 95% of its current user base can likely continue to use the basic free account, but many small and medium-sized businesses and organizations will need to upgrade to one of four pro accounts ($5-100 per month) to continue using some of their favorite features like multiple team members and the ability to manage more than five social networks. Other perks of the pro accounts include an ad-free UI, prioritized support response time, enhanced stats (including Google Analytics integration) and vanity short URLs.
HootSuite also offers an Enterprise account for a whopping $1499/month, which includes everything that the pro account has, plus follower insights, top-notch enterprise support and VIP staff training. What do you think? Twitter’s Best Business Model Yet. We’ve been waiting a long time for Twitter to reveal their game plan, the real way that they were going to monetise the huge community that they have on the site. Sponsored tweets might have been it, but they have just trumped themselves and revealed their ultimate business model : their data. In a huge move, Twitter announced earlier this month that their data was now available to ‘buy’ through a partnership with Gnip, which provides real time social media data for organisations.
At least, organisations that can afford it. So just what deal have Twitter struck with Gnip and what other data trends can we see, that could change the web as we know it? Purchase Twitter data at a price The product offered through Gnip allows organisations to purchase up to 50% of tweets over a year. Monetising the social web The move by Twitter hints at the future monetisation of the social web.
We’ve frequently seen how important data is to social media and also how many problems it can cause. Research.ly Debuts Real-Time Social Search Platform, Plus 3 Years of Twitter's Archive. There's a new tool that online marketers, brand managers and social media experts should be aware of: Research.ly, a new social search platform for researching Twitter conversations and tracking the associated analytics. But this is not your average Twitter analytics tool.
Research.ly uses parent company PeopleBrowsr's proprietary server technology to surface a historical analysis of Tweets, going back three years, thanks to its access to Twitter's full feed, a data stream often referred to as the "Twitter firehose. " Not only that, but Research.ly has built custom indexes on top of this database of Tweets, including indexes for things like gender, sentiment, location, degrees of separation and more. Research.ly's technology breakthrough are these custom indexes on top of Twitter's firehose. As noted above, they include gender, ? What that means for the service's end users is that you have the ability to parse Twitter analytics in a number of different ways. Seesmic Launches Swiss Army Knife for Social Networks: Tech News « Seesmic, the social-networking startup founded by French entrepreneur Loic LeMeur, today launched a new version of its Seesmic Desktop application that allows users to log in to more accounts from the app’s single dashboard, and also allows them to customize their activity streams by adding plugins from an open marketplace.
Plugins that support more than 40 other related social applications and services are available at launch, including Topsy, Klout, MySpace, Formspring, Google Reader and Ning. There’s even a plugin for connecting to Zappos, the popular shoe retailer, that lets you share news of your purchases with friends. The idea behind expanding Seesmic’s repertoire “came from the understanding that our users desired support of many different social services, more than just Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn,” LeMeur writes in a blog post about the launch of the new app.
Facebook versus Twitter: who does the bait and switch better? What happens when Web 2.0 startups founded on principles of openness and freedom grow up? If we're referring to Facebook and Twitter, the answer is obvious: get a business model. Unfortunately, finding a business model and implementing it successfully can be hard to do, especially when you previously invited third party developers to your 'open' platform and told them to keep the change. So it's really no surprise that Facebook and Twitter, which have collectively raised north of three-quarters of a billion dollars in financing, are finding it necessary to pull the good old bait and switch on developers. Facebook, which launched its platform in 2007, lured developers to its platform with the promise that they could monetize their applications any way they saw fit. But some of the developers who took Facebook up on the offer have done so well that the company now wants a piece of the action, and isn't afraid to use strong-arm tactics to get what it wants.
Here's why. Twitter’s In-Stream Targeted Tweet Ads Begin Today In HootSuite. Twitoaster. Twitter Hints About What Developers Should Build. Software developers who build Twitter apps and Web sites arrived at Chirp, the developer conference in San Francisco this week, with trepidation about whether Twitter’s future plans would put them out of business. Twitter executives tried to calm their fears by offering a few hints about what types of apps they thought developers should build. For background, developers have created tools to do things on Twitter, like post photos or respond to corporate customers. But in the run-up to the conference, Twitter did say a few things that made clear that it would build or buy apps that did some of these things and compete with developers.
Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive, advised developers to figure out how to make people understand what Twitter was and how to use it. A new homepage and sign-up process has increased new user retention by 20 percent, but there is a lot of work to be done, he said. “Twitter is too hard,” he said. This is a particular opportunity in developing countries. Twitter Takes Over The Tweet Button From TweetMeme. Slowly but surely, Twitter is taking control of all the key features that make it such a powerful communication medium. Today, it is introducing the Tweet button, a way for Websites to get visitors to share stories and links with one click.
Of course, this already exists in various forms, the most popular of which is the Retweet button created by TweetMeme, which is on so many sites (including ours) that it currently generates 750 million impressions a day. Well, that is all very likely going away. “We expect people to switch,” says Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead, “and we support that.” Twitter is killing TweetMeme’s Retweet button, but with love.
Twitter?s In-Stream Targeted Tweet Ads Begin Today In HootSuite.