India is one of the biggest markets for the microblogging platform Twitter. The country is the 3rd largest market for Twitter after the US and Japan. The number of Twitter users in the country had seen a growth in the year 2020 of more than 70%. The company has launched a new feature in India called Tip Jars. Let’s look at more information regarding the feature.
The social media giant, Twitter on 24 June 2021, has released a new feature on its platform which is called Tip Jar. This feature will be available on the microblogging platform in India where the users can contribute money in the form of tips to their favorite content creator or an organization according to their choice and wish.
The social media platform has collaborated with the Indian-based payment gateway in order to roll out this feature.
What is the Tip Jar feature on Twitter?
Twitter had announced that it has added Razorpay as an option to its Tip-Jar feature, which will make it easier for Indians to send and receive cash gifts from their followers or the users who love their content.
The feature is available only for a handful of people that include creators, journalists, community leaders, experts, public figures, and currently can be used by Twitter users on iOS and Android devices. The service is also available within spaces on Android devices.
Tip Jar was first introduced in May and users have the option to tip their favorite content creators using various payment gateways such as PayPal, Patreon, Bandcamp, Venmo, Cash App and now the company recently added Razorpay as well.
The Twitter users that use Razorpay in order to tip their content creators can send money through a wide range of options such as UPI, Debit Card, Credit Card, Net Banking, Wallets, etc. The Tip jar services in the country are available in many languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, Tamil, and Bengali. This will enable to feature to be accessible around the country.
Another important tip to note about Tip Jar is that the microblogging platform does not take any cut or a percentage from the money tipped to the content creators. All the money that is tipped can be kept by the content creator itself.
How to use Razorpay for receiving tips on Twitter?
If you are one of the content creators who come under the above mentioned category, you can follow the below steps in order to receive tips using Razorpay from your followers.
In the first step you need to create a Razorpay account.
Then, you will have to turn on the Tip Jar feature on Twitter, allow tips and click on Razorpay.
After that, you will have to paste the custom suffix from the payment page of your dashboard.
Now, you will have to copy the URL and it will get placed on the Tip Jar advertisement.
Other upcoming features on Twitter
Twitter has been trying ways through which content creators can monetize through the social media platform. The company is said to be currently testing ticketed spaces where the users host a Twitter Space where they can charge the users or followers who are interested to attend with an amount as low as USD 1 to as high as USD 999.
The company is also working on super follow through which the content creators can earn a monthly revenue by offering interaction and extra content through a monthly subscription process. The ticketed space and Super Follow feature are still being tested by the company and haven’t been rolled out widely.
Conclusion
The Tip jar feature that is introduced by Twitter is a move from the company to help people to earn or monetize their content on the social media platform. Twitter is one of the major social media platforms in the entire world.
FAQ
How does Twitter make revenue?
Twitter divides its revenue into two categories: the sale of advertising services, which constitutes the vast majority of the company’s revenue, as well as data licensing and other services.
What is Twitter’s net worth
Twitter’s net worth is estimated to be about $35 billion. Twitter’s main sources of income are Ad and data licensing.
Do celebrities get paid to tweet?
Yes, many athletes and celebrities earn through Twitter.
Twitter is an American based microblogging platform and a social media networking service that has around 192 million daily active users as of 2021. According to a data received from 2019, an average Twitter user spent around 3.39 minutes on the platform. Recently Twitter has acquired the reading service called Scroll. Let’s look at why the company had acquired Scroll.
On 5 May 2021,Twitter said that it had acquired Scroll which is a service that is based on the subscription that provides news articles with removed advertisements.
They added saying that the company had built a new way that led the subscribers to read the articles without the ads, pop-ups or any other disturbances that a user face on the digital platforms. The company will clean up the reading experience of their users by providing their subscribers with what they require.
Scroll Website
Twitter also told that the publishers who work with Scroll have revealed that they get a chance to make more revenue than they will be able to make from any page through the running of traditional advertisements.
Twitter’s plan
Twitter said that they consider it to be an exciting opportunity for them to introduce this proven business model to the publishers on Twitter’s platform. This is expected to make reading the news much more better for everyone involved with it.
The company said while looking into the future, Scroll will be added to their subscription model in a much more meaningful manner as the company has plans to build and introduce a subscription service on their digital platform in the future.
In the year 2020, the microblogging platform had confirmed that it was working towards exploring an idea to create a paid service on the basis of a subscription model which would include a lot of new features and services. The company expects to develop it in a way where the users will be willing for subscribing to it as per reports.
The company is also working towards developing a feature for its Publishers and content creators called Super Follows. Earlier this year, Twitter had mentioned about this feature during its Analyst Day Event.
The feature is planned to work as an account subscription where the subscribers will get access to various services offered by the content creators and publishers on the social media major’s platform.
These include paid newsletters, audio conversations, special access to direct messages, exclusive tweets, etc. At the beginning of 2021, Twitter had acquired Revue which is a platform that offers users such as writers and content publishers to publish the editorial newsletters.
Twitter had conveyed in a blog post which said that imagine as a Twitter subscriber getting access to the premium features where one would get an easy access to read articles from your favourite news outlet or a newsletter from a writer through Revue.
It added on that the portion of the subscription amount would go to the publishers and the content creators.
Twitter said that Scroll will temporarily stop new sign-ups because of the latest acquisition. Twitter added that they will work towards including the company’s services into their subscription plans and will look forward to growing the number of publishers of Scroll’s platform.
The social media major said that they will continue to support the community that already exists on Scroll such as the publishers, content creators and the customers and it added that the new Publishers who are interested to join the Scroll’s community can sign up on their website for the latest updates.
FAQ
What is Twitter’s net worth?
Twitters net worth is estimated around $4.4B.
Which country uses twitter the most?
United States, Japan and India are the top three countries that uses twitter the most.
Who is the CEO of Twitter?
Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter.
Conclusion
Twitter has around 11.7 million downloads on the app store and around 67 % of the B2B businesses using it as a digital marketing tool. Around 40% of the Twitter users have claimed that they have purchased something after seeing a tweet on the platform. We will have to see how the new subscription model of Twitter would bring a change in the market ecosystem.
Twitter is moving beyond the traditional social networking business model and is experimenting with new business model to sustain their platform. The latest test is a subscription service for exclusive features.
Twitter is considering a subscription model to counteract its falling ad revenues. CEO Jack Dorsey said subscriptions are just one of several ways the company is looking to boost income from users.
Twitter has had a meteoric growth as a popular microblogging platform with its quirks. Several celebrities like Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Kangana Ranaut use this platform to post controversial thoughts quickly picked up by the audience.
A subscription model could offer a new source of revenue for Twitter. By charging some of its 353 million users in the US and others elsewhere to access extra features such as more followers or enhanced analytics. It would also mark Twitter’s most significant departure from its core advertising business model when it is struggling to attract advertisers.
The company has suffered a sharp decline in its ad revenue in recent quarters as it works to grow beyond its stagnant user base. The majority of the revenue share came from the targeted advertising model that this platform offered. In 2021, Twitter is looking to move away from revenue dependency on brand-oriented advertising approach.
How will Twitter’s new Subscription Model look like
Twitter launched a survey among users last year in July 2020 to analyze the interest levels.
After CEO Jack Dorsey confirmed Twitter is exploring a subscription model, the company is conducting user surveys on what type of features they'd like to see in such a service.
Undo send, special badges for profiles and advanced analytics are among the features being considered. pic.twitter.com/hL6T8sdI0s
These are the potential features that are likely to be provided to the premium Twitter users in 2021.
1. Undo Send
Post something really embarrassing accidentally on Twitter? No problem. This feature helps you delete your Tweet before anyone even sees it, all within 30 seconds of posting. The premium Undo event on Twitter is a simple way to recall or withdraw a tweet, so it never gets seen by anyone.
2. Custom Colors
Change the feel and look of Twitter – adapt it to suit your style. In addition to Night Mode, the premium feature allows you to change your default background color and other critical elements in your interface. The new custom color setting gives you more control over the appearance of Twitter on your phone or computer.
3. Video Publishing
Twitter currently limits uploaded video size to 140 seconds or 6 MB for most users. With a premium subscription, you could publish videos 5x longer than the current default settings (i.e. 5 minutes), and use a much higher maximum resolution (8192×8192) for each frame within the video.
4. Badges
Twitter Badge helps users learn more about the people they follow on Twitter. The badge shows users the businesses a user writes for or owns. It’s just another way for people to discover others and get to know them better. It also helps maintain a credible brand presence.
5. Auto Responses
Auto-response in the premium version of Twitter helps you come up with tweets that can increase your following. This is done through a menu of auto-responses to use in the direct messages to Twitter netizens. When Twitter detects a matching phrase, it will send out an automated reply.
6. Social Listening
See how often your brand is mentioned on Twitter and get a deeper understanding of what people are saying with the new social listening tool. This tool lets you see the general conversation around a brand, including total volume seen through the social search function, and which users or businesses are talking most often.
7. Brand Surveys
Create surveys and polls to collect feedback about your Twitter Ads campaigns. This insight can help you measure your campaigns effectiveness, understand if your audience is likely to buy the products or services featured in your ad, and optimise future creatives.
8. Freedom from Ads
Enjoy premium Twitter with a different kind of streaming experience. Say goodbye to ads; say hello to a whole new look and feel without the distractions of promoted tweets. Have your data protected from advertisers and upgrade the privacy options.
Disclaimer: “This is not necessarily reflective of Twitter’s future subscription model, and will change at the discretion of Twitter’s management. The survey is the current source of official information.”
Twitter Revenue
Will the Subscription Model impact Twitter’s growth
There has been a general resistance against paid social media networks in general. A Washington Poll in 2018 revealed that fifty-eight percent of the respondents wouldn’t pay for Facebook if it adopted a paid network model. The same would go true for Twitter. However, Twitter has always emphasized that they would not ask the users to pay for the current features they enjoy.
The most important thing to remember is that Twitter must be a zero-sum game. For users who are not paying for access, there can’t be any knock-on effect of paid Twitter users keeping content to themselves.
Twitter is a model that depends on users, not mouse clicks. It’s the connective tissue between friends and strangers, emphasizing broadcast v/s a one-way conversation (social media has been big on one-way communication).
FAQ
How does Twitter make money?
Twitter earns its revenue from Data licensing and Advertisements.
What is Twitter’s net worth?
As of Oct, 2020 Twitters revenue was nearly $40 billion.
Who is the CEO of Twitter?
Jack Dorsey is currently the CEO of Twitter.
Conclusion
An exclusive Twitter subscription model could be just what the company needs to make money and keep customers privacy intact. In this world, where our activity across social media platforms is monitored, Twitter can offer a premium social network to eliminate our privacy concerns.
Spare yourself a minute or two and make a note of the mobile applications you consistently use. There’s a high chance of WhatsApp being one of them. Want to text someone? WhatsApp. Want to do a video call? WhatsApp. Eager to share the latest joke? WhatsApp. The one stop solution for messaging, voice calls, video calls, and whatnot, WhatsApp is now an indispensable part of our life. WhatsApp is in a league of its own, racing past competition. By 2011, approximately one billion messages were being sent per day on the app.
Indians are the most active users in WhatsApp according to country wise survey; they are 10% of the total users worldwide. By 2013, WhatsApp had 200 million active users and according to a recently concluded survey, WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion monthly active users. WhatsApp was co-founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum. It was then acquired by Facebook in 2014 for a whopping $19 billion. Presently, Acton is associated with the Signal Foundation. According to Forbes (2020), BrianActon is the 836th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $2.5billion.
Brian Acton – Biography
Name
Brian Acton
Born
February 17, 1972 – Michigan
Age
48 (2020)
Nationality
American
Education
Stanford University (BS), Lake Howell High School
Known for
Co-founded WhatsApp with Jan Koum in 2009, Co-founded Signal Foundation with Moxie Marlinspike in 2018, Founder Sunlight Giving
Brian Acton is the co-founder of WhatsApp, a freeware platform to send messages and files. He is a computer programmer and an internet entrepreneur. Brian is currently is the executive chairman of the Signal Foundation, a company wants to secure global communication across the world. Brian is a former employee of Yahoo! and was rejected by Facebook for employment.
Brian Acton – Journey
Brian Acton – Journey
Brian Acton – Education
A child prodigy, Brian was brought up in Central Florida and studied at Lake Howell High School. Even after receiving a full scholarship to pursue studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he chose Stanford University. He has a degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, 1994.
Brian was a system administrator at Rockwell International, before switching to the tech giant, Apple Inc. and Adobe where he was a product tester. He was also associated with Yahoo! as its 44th employee. He worked for over nine years at Yahoo! and unfortunately, lost millions when he had invested in the dotcom boom. The dotcom bubble was a period of excessive speculation in the United States where there was a massive growth of the internet world; it lasted over a decade. After a loss in investments, Brain and Jan took a year off and went to the neighboring continent of South America. Post this vacation, Brian and Jan applied at Facebook, but both were rejected.
Brian Acton as Founder of WhatsApp
The Facebook rejection was disappointing but not enough to deter Brian. When Jan Koum brought an iPhone in the year 2009, Brian recognized the endless opportunities the App Store had. The duo along with Alex Fishman pondered over an app of theirs. Brian Acton along with Jan Koum announced the coming of WhatsApp by setting up its headquarters in California on the 24thof February, 2009.
Brian sold WhatsApp to the social media giant Facebook in 2014 at a valuation of $22 billion. Life’s a full circle in the end, the company that rejected Brian ended up buying his own venture!
Whatsapp Logo
Brian Acton – Net Worth and Influence
Brian’s net worth is $2.5 billion (As per Forbes 2020). He is ranked 551st by Forbes. By owning a 20% stake in WhatsApp, he was one of the most influential people in the company. He was later offered jobs at companies like Twitter and Facebook, which he turned down. He even left WhatsApp due to a dispute with Facebook regarding the monetization of WhatsApp, voluntarily parting away with $850 million in unvested options.
With success comes great power, and with great power comes great responsibility. A venerated entrepreneur ought to serve the society. This attribute is deeply entrenched in all the successful entrepreneurs we’ve seen till date. Brian lays great emphasis on philanthropy.
In 2014, Brian and his wife Tegan Acton started the Sunlight Giving. This organization provides basic services to the children in the range of 0-4 years who belong to families with low income. After leaving WhatsApp in 2017, he started another foundation named the Signal Foundation in 2018.
Even after multiple setbacks, Brain didn’t back down. He learned from his mistakes, not repeating them again.
“You never know what’s coming up, just don’t forget to try harder the next day”, advocates Brian.
The fact that Facebook rejected Brian but ended up buying his startup is inspiring. Brian and Koum focused on user satisfaction, denying advertisements on WhatsApp. The Facebook-WhatsApp partnership wasn’t one Brian wished for due to conflict in opinions (Facebook is known for advertisements and the duo of Brian and Koum never supported ads on WhatsApp). A man true to his words, Brian has always placed his consumers over publicity and money. A luminary, Brian Acton has left an indelible mark on the digital space.
Twitter is a social media for microblogging. With 330 million active users per month, Twitter is one of the most used Social media platform. If that’s not enough, a total of 5,786 tweets are sent each second, which makes it 500 million tweets every single day. According to a report, 75% of B2B and 65% of B2C businesses are marketing on Twitter, which is more than any major social media individually except Facebook. Marketers know the value of using Twitter for business.
You also might be using Twitter from a long time but have you planned for using it to generate leads and grow your business? If not, this is the time to do so. Twitter can be used as a platform to interact with your customers and to find more cutomers to generate leads. Hence, can be beneficial for your business.
Let’s see some of the best practices for twitter you can do to improve your brand value on Twitter.
Best way to use Twitter for Business
Create a Brand-Centric profile
As a business, you need to create a business account on Twitter. Your business profile should contain all details, contacts and social media mentions of your brand. There should be pictures and tweets related to the product. The user reviews can also be a part of the profile. The Twitter profile benefits the company to create and maintain its brand image.
Reply the queries
You need tobe attentive towards the customer queries regarding the product, they have tweeted you. This will create an image of an attentive and caring brand which replies it’s customers on time. Many times, you get to know a lot about your products down side from customer reviews.
Grab Customers
Find your potential customers by the tweets people post. Keep searching for the relevant tweets. If a person complains about your competitor’s service, grab the opportunity and promote your product there. To grab more followers, several tools can come in handy. These tools can provide a good rate of followers to the account, grabbing more attention of potential customers. Some of such tools are- Crowdfire, Tweepsi, Socialboss, etc. These tools will be helpful in finding the potential followers and will eventually benefit the company.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter provides a tool called Twitter Analytics. With Twitter Analytics you can analyse the performance of your tweets. You can track your customer’s interest, occupation, gender, status, buying behavior, etc. With that data, you can modify your product or business/marketing strategy. Analysing Twitter data can be the best practise for your business.
Retweet
Retweet is to reshare any tweet on Twitter. So, if your customer is happy, they can retweet your tweets. However you need to ask your best customer to retweet your promotional tweet through tweets or messages.
Customer Service
You can ask people to tweet their problems on Twitter. Solve their problem if it is possible to do that in the comments only. Moreover, tell them that you will look into their problem ASAP if you can’t solve their problems by just explainingit. This is one of the biggest benefit of Twitter, as not only it will solve your customers’ problems, but it show others how much you care about your customers.
Watching the Competitors
You can keep an eye on the activity of your competitors with the help of Twitter. Analyse their marketing strategy, customer service, customer’s problems, etc. After that, you can create your strategy to beat your competitors. Analysing competitor’s strategy can be the most effective way of using Twitter for business.
Trending Posts
Trends can provide a boost to the company online if done the right way. However, you need to do it in the right time because trends has time limit. Twitter can help you analyse and keep a track of the existing and upcoming social media trends. With the help of the trend, you can come up with better marketing plans and products. Also, you can post anything which is relevant to your product and to the trend. Your post can go viral if you did it good.
Keyword Research
With the help of tools like Hootsuite or TweetDeck, you can monitor some keywords and identify the lead. For example, you can set 3 keywords say “gifts” “handmade” and “customized”. So, when anyone uses these keywords in your area, you can get in touch with them and pitch your product if you deal in handmade gifts.
Pin Tweet
You can pin tweets so that when anyone visits your profile, the first tweet they see is the one you want them to see. You can pin your best promotional tweet on your profile. This will help your potential customers to know about product or service.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers are the perfect wingman for the companies as they are going to match you up with the potential and the required customers for the brand. Hence, look for the people who are expert influencers in the respective field, that your business deals with and pay them to promote your brand. As they have the required market, your business will surely get the attention it requires.
Regular update
Don’t get away from your account for too long as it can wipe out the brand’s image. Hence, keep on regular posting about the products and other updates. This way you will be in the mind of the followers. Also, it shows how responsible you are towards your brand which is a good thing from the investor’s point of view.
Hashtags
Use the correct Twitter hashtags which are related to the content. Twitter hashtags makes your content available to the mass audience. Hashtags are a fun way to spread the brand across more audience. You can first do a research about the hashtag keywords which are trending and relevant. Twitter hashtags optimise the post, hence are a crucial factor for Twitter post.
Run Ads on Twitter
As you may feel little dip on organic reach on Twitter in 2020. Thus, you should run twitter ads to reach more people. Twitter ads are comparatively cheap. There are different types of Twitter ads are like, promoted tweets, promoted accounts, promoted trends or website card to increase your website or blog traffic. You may run App card ads to boost the numbers of app download. It will help you to generate quality leads and conversions.
Benefits of using twitter for marketing and brand promotion
You might be thinking why should we use Twitter for social media marketing because there are very less active users. But here we have listed some of the benefits of using twitter for social media marketing.
Drive more traffic to your website Twitter is a platform from where you can drive a lot of traffic to your website because this is the ideal platform for audience engagement. The best thing about Twitter is that here people can engage with any type of content and there is no complex algorithm. But you have to work hard to drive traffic from Twitter. You have to update 10-12 tweets every day to get a large engagement on your content.
If you’re not using social media to drive traffic and leads, then your brand is losing out “big time.” – Sam Hurley
Build your business network Do you want to build relation with big influencers or celebrities? If yes, then Twitter is the right platform for you, especially if you are a business. On Twitter, you will get all the high-profile from any industry. The biggest advantage of using Twitter is that here it is really easy to connect with anyone. It’s just like texting someone but here your tweets are public.
Generate leads easily It’s easy to generate leads on Twitter as compared to other social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. On Twitter when you tweet not only your targeted followers but also the public can see your tweet. So, here you have the opportunity to generate new leads and convert them into a customer. You just need to post quality content with Call-To-Action regularly. Because here you are not paying for ads so you have to put your efforts and time to get a better result.
Building reputation of your brand Twitter is a place where you can express about your brand. As Twitter is a pubic platform where your content is conveyed easily to the people. Twitter has allowed you to build the reputation of your brand by updating quality content. Even the high-profile industry believes that a brand is genuine if they interact with people a lot and they are always ready to express their feeling for the users.
Improve your SEO and grow organically Every social media platforms has a good relationship with Google. Especially twitter is the best friend of Google because your tweets are also visible on search results. So, here you have the opportunity to rank on your targeted keywords. It is the most cost-effective way to improve your online presence organically. But unlike paid ads here you have to work hard and smart.
Conclusion
Twitter is much more than you think. Companies know this, that is why they tweet you when you have any problems.
In one case, a person was having a problem with the internet speed in Airtel connection, which is a reputable mobile network company in India. When he tweeted about it, Airtel didn’t respond so well. The person then tweeted “I don’t think Airtel is doing well these days, thinking of porting to Jio or Idea” (not the exact words, but something like that). Jio and Idea, the rivals, responded in minutes after that person tweeted it, asking for the personal details to register a SIM on his name. Do you know, what happened next? His Airtel internet speed boosted in just an hour or so. This shows that companies are taking Twitter so seriously.
Hence, using Twitter for business can be proved very crucial tactic.
So, use all the tips for Twitter mentioned above to interact with your audience, generate leads and grow your business.
Alan Joseph
