29 July, 2017
With growth stalling, the company is seeking new ways to bring in money, and its latest idea is a tweet promotion service for a fixed monthly fee.
Twitter's advertising products already allow users and business to pay to promote their tweets to a broader audience.
This includes "up to" the first 10 tweets posted every day.
For Twitter users who were invited and pay $US99 per month, Twitter will automatically promote your account's tweets onto people's timelines that don't follow your account. However, Twitter would have full control over which tweets get promoted and which don't.
Under the $99 plan, the tweets are automatically promoted and users wouldn't get a say in which tweets are selected for promotion.
"Instead of creating and optimizing separate Twitter Ads campaigns yourself, this program will do the heavy lifting". But they can target either a metro region, such as NY, or an interest, like "technology and computing".
'We are unable to support both targeting criteria at this time, ' according to Twitter.
This service is supposed to take some of the effort out of regular Twitter Ads, which requires users to set up each promoted campaign.
When Twitter revealed its Q2 earnings yesterday the figures weren't quite as bright as people would have hoped. The company posted higher than expected revenue and growth last quarter, but posted zero user growth this quarter.
'It's not a recipe for a stock you want to buy'.
Twitter had 328 million average monthly active users (MAU) in the three months through June 30, unchanged from the previous quarter. It's still invite-only for now, however, so you'll likely have to be patient if you're interested.
Advertising revenue fell 8 percent to $489 million, but well exceeded the $458.1 million estimate.
Twitter did make a profit of $574 million by selling ads last quarter, although at a decrease of 5% year-over-year.
