Earlier this month, Twitter told investors it’s considering a subscription model as a means of generating additional revenue to support its business. Now we know what sort of value-add features Twitter may be eyeing. In a new survey, the company asks users to evaluate paid features like “undo send” (an alternative to an edit button), as well as other ideas like custom colors, the ability to publish longer and more high-def videos, support for profile badges, auto responses, additional “social listening” analytics, and the ability to run brand surveys about ads.
The survey asks users to select the options they felt were most or least important to them.
Details of the survey were first published to none other than Twitter itself by Twitter user @WFBrother. The findings were then amplified by eagle-eyed social media consultant, Matt Navarra, who had also seen the survey.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the questions had come from a survey the company was running to evaluate options for a membership model, as the survey describes.
The company declined to offer any further comment, but noted its Q2 shareholder letter had detailed its plans in this area:
“We are also in the early stages of exploring additional potential revenue product opportunities to compliment our advertising business,” the letter had said. “These may include subscriptions and other approaches, and although our exploration is very early and we do not expect any revenue attributable to these opportunities in 2020, you may see tests or hear us talk more about them as our work progresses,” it noted.
Specifically, the survey asked users about the following options:
- Undo Send: A 30 seconds window for you to recall/withdraw a Tweet before anyone can see it. This has been something Twitter has suggested in the past could be a viable alternative to an “Edit” button — something users have demanded for years. Instead of allowing unlimited edits to tweets, and the significant engineering investment that would entail — users could instead quickly fix a typo they spotted shortly after posting.
- Custom Colors: In addition to “Night Mode,” you could change the fonts and theme color of Twitter on your phone and computer. Background color, links, mentions, hashtags, and icons would appear in whatever color you choose.
- Video Publishing: You could publish videos up to 5x longer than current default, which a much higher maximum resolution (8192×8192)
- Badges: You get a badge(s) on your profile that links to businesses you own or work for (Example: A journalist can have a badge showing the magazines they write for.)
- Auto responses: Able to write and set a menu of auto responses to use in replies. This would likely be more useful to brands who wanted to redirect customer inquiries to official channels.
- Social listening: You can see conversation around your account on Twitter, including total volume, the people and businesses who are talking most often, and what they are saying. This, again, would largely appeal to brands.
- Brand Surveys: You could be able to survey people about the ads you run to better understand if you ad was memorable and if people are likely to buy the products or services featured. Twitter today already runs similar ads, so this feature would be relatively easy for it to implement.
The survey does not represent features Twitter will definitely roll out as part of any future membership model, of course. It’s only the first step to gathering consumer feedback about what people believe is worth paying for.
Not on the survey? A real “edit” button, of course. That one just may never happen!
