Twitter has said in the past that it might start offering special paid services for businesses, and it looks like the first tentative toe has finally been dipped into the water.

While venture capital has been thrown at Twitter for ages now, the biggest question has been for ages, “How will it finally be monetized?” For whatever reason the company has acted like putting ads on the site would be akin to releasing a plague, and there have been little to no hints as to what other options there might be.

Finally, there was some suggestion earlier this year that Twitter might start charging businesses that use the service for some extra features that would be useful to them.  That was nearly four months ago, and nothing has been heard about this development since.  Then last night it suddenly seems that Twitter is going to launch an all out offensive to get as many businesses as possible using its service when it launched the educational Twitter 101 site.

The site is essentially a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) about how businesses can effectively use the microblogging service, along with case studies of the success some are already enjoying.  Of course one of the most notable stories is about how Dell has used its Twitter to account to rack up over $3 million in sales, but there also stories about other companies using the service to distribute coupons, keeping in touch with customers, notifying them of new services and so on.

Overall it is a great starting off point for companies that have been curious what all the hoopla is about, but had no idea of what exactly Twitter can do for them.

This does appear to be the first move towards new subscription services for business accounts as Anamitra Banerji, manager of commercial products at Twitter, told The New York Times that later this year the company will roll out tools such as verifying their accounts and analyzing traffic to their Twitter profiles.  No potential costs have yet been mentioned, but considering how tight lipped Twitter is about its business practices, that isn’t all that surprising.

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Entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 3:26 pm under Social Media.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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