Twitter is considering the idea of developing a premium subscription service for its most demanding users, according to numerous individuals who recently took online to share screenshots of a survey implying that the San Francisco-based company is in the process of making a new tool for its power users. Two such screenshots can be seen in the gallery below, and both of them imply that the social media giant is looking to introduce the paid subscription service as an extension of TweetDeck, its dashboard application designed for Twitter account management.
The new feature of TweetDeck will reportedly feature more robust analytics, breaking news alerts, and detailed breakdowns of topics about which followers of any particular account are tweeting. The wording of the survey that Twitter sent to some users implies that its plans wouldn’t involve turning TweetDeck into a paid service. Instead, the new features for power users would apparently be available within TweetDeck as a paid add-on. Following this report, a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge that the hypothetical tool would be advertised as a “more enhanced version of TweetDeck,” but implied that nothing is set in stone yet and the survey that some power users were asked to fill is simply an effort by the company to stay in touch with the demands and preferences of some of its major clients.
A source with knowledge of the matter later said that the San Francisco-based social media company still hasn’t started developing the aforementioned addition to TweetDeck. Instead, it’s currently in the process of planning a detailed product roadmap that the feedback received from the survey is meant to help define. If accurate, that revelation suggests that the paid component of TweetDeck has already been decided on and it’s now only a matter of time before Twitter launches it. Naturally, there’s still no word on how much this service would cost but its subscription fee will likely be aimed at media professionals and not regular users who happen to have a few Twitter accounts. This move could also be interpreted as yet another one of Twitter’s attempts to monetize its platform that has been struggling to make money in recent years.
