Twitter is developing a new kind of profile page for business accounts, similar to Facebook Pages, according to London-based Sarah Shearman of BrandRepublic The report was based on conversations with multiple unnamed sources familiar with the plans.
Shearman’s report indicates that the pages will provide more space than currently offered for brands to communicate with visitors. “Chief Executive Dick Costolo, and Adam Bain, president of revenue, are leading the push to create fresh revenue streams,” Shearman writes. (Update below the fold.)
Marketers we spoke to tonight expressed support for the idea; Twitter has not yet responded to our request for comment.
Update: At 11:00 AM PST Twitter responded with the following statement.
“We already offer a way for brands to have a presence on Twitter– they’re called profile pages; from Verizon Wireless and H&M to Coca-Cola and Papa John’s, tens of thousands of brands and marketers have an active presence on Twitter. While we’re always thinking about ways we could deliver more value for these companies, we’ve got no additional comment.”
Sounds like a no comment.
Rick Mans, Social Media Lead at Capgemini, a technology consulting firm based in Paris, France with 110,000 employees across 40 countries, finds the possibility intriguing.
“Branded pages on Twitter could be interesting, although Twitter is more flow-based than page based. I think it would be very useful for brands to have a page that is richer than the current profile page, especially for users who will visit the page of the brand for the first time. That would be the added value for me: having a broader introduction to the brand than just the limited profile Twitter now offers and offer information beyond the traditional Tweet. Integration of branded pages with the existing ecosystem of tools could be interesting.”
While brand advertisers would no doubt be overjoyed by the prospect of breaking free from the constraints of the current platform, brand pages like Facebook’s may not work on Twitter, which is a different kind of network.
Both networks are historically unusual in that they offer brands an opportunity to try to convince would-be customers to subscribe to updates from the brand, integrated into a stream of real-time multi-media updates from friends and family. To date, a brand’s ability on Twitter to make a call to action to subscribe has been subject to substantial limitations due to the structure of the site.
Would users recoil at increased brand messaging on Twitter? Might it lead to the MySpace-ification of Twitter profile pages? Making customized profile pages a paid product for verified business owners could help prevent that from happening.
Twitter and social media ecosystem investor John Borthwick called the reported plans for business accounts “smart and necessary” tonight on Twitter.
Twitter has consistently taken bold risks in creating new advertising products, though, and this sounds like it could be one of the next ones. At the same time, Twitter has been criticized for being far slower at rolling out business services than would-be customers would have liked.
“It seems interesting and a natural progression, but I’m interested in the features,” says Nick Gonzales, VP of Operations at Nervora Digital Media Group in the United Arab Emirates. “Brands can already own personal accounts, and if anything Facebook’s branded product has tried to move back to being more like user accounts.”
Would users recoil at increased brand messaging on Twitter? Might it lead to the MySpace-ification of Twitter profile pages? Making customized profile pages a paid product for verified business owners could help prevent that from happening. It may be difficult to imagine how users would react – but it’s very clear that business users would love to take a shot at it.
