The latest rumour circulating of how the twitter owners plan to monetise their recent surge in users comes curtousy of Marketing magazine, which in itself, is evidence of twitter gaining further mainstream coverage.  In an interview with Biz Stone, cofounder of twitter, Fiona Ramsay quotes Stone as saying, ‘We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.’

Reading between the lines of the article it sounds to me Stone said it more as an idea than the definitive solution to monetising twitter, but is this the best he can come up with?

Obviously there is value in twitter for businesses.  They gain access to their customers in a conversational manner, something you don’t get outside the realms of social networking.  The ability to push messages at your consumers in real time, and more importantly, gain feedback on your product/service from an engaged audience, certainly has some value.  But how much value?  and is it enough for companies to want to pay for an account?  I have my doubts.  Especially when individuals at said company could set up personal accounts and act on behalf of the company without any associated costs.

A much simpler model would be ad funded, maybe not in the traditional way but in a more flexible, targeted way, as Facebook has started doing.  Everyone on twitter expresses an interest in one thing or another.  Through the small bio they write to accompany their profile, through the website link they choose to list, but more importantly, through the updates they make, some up to 50 a day!  Due to the way in which people use twitter, they constantly refer to products and activities which they use or partake in as part of their every day life.

People tweet about their phones (mostly iPhone and Blackberry at the minute but others will catch up!), they tweet about their laptops, their lifestyles, and just about everything else that is going on in their life.  A search on twitter for “valentines day” for example reveals that hundreds of people who have mentioned it in their recent tweets.  Now imagine being a flower company, wouldn’t you pay to hit these guys with a targeted advert around now?  You could even use smart technology to interpret the senitment of the statement to avoid hitting those with an “I hate valentines day” sentiment so as to avoid compounding their misery!

In fact, keyword level targeting with a sentiment filter could be awesome (can you tell I am writing as I think!?!).  Imagine being able to target those who were mentioned your competition in a negative way.  Hitting somebody who writes “broadband provider X sucks, I have been on the phone for hours!” with an ad for your alternative broadband package with 5 star customer service, priceless!

The continually evolving conversation of twitter could make it a highly exciting prospoect for advertisers (there have been 41 more velntines based tweets since I wrote the above!).  As an advertiser you could track tweet trends in real time and evolev your campaigns to match.  Facebook’s targetting platform is great, but it is pretty static as it is based on profile information more than anything else.  Twitter would have a potentially endless stream of inventory for topical products and services and this would make the advertising platform a hugely exciting prospect.

Im sure the top dogs at twitter are consider these options as we speak, but I sure do hope that charging for commercial accounts isnt the best thing they come up with!