Twitter trials monthly subscription plan for tweet promotion
Twitter is beta-testing a monthly subscription plan for auto-promoting tweets, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses that lack the capability to advertise effectively. The scheme costs $99 per month, while beta users can sign up for a free trial, during which the first 10 tweets each day are promoted. Twitter added the caveat that results "may vary based on performance". The move may be an answer to the company's 8% drop in ad revenues during Q2 2017.

Twitter is currently testing a $99 (£75) a month subscription plan which helps power users and small businesses to increase their reach by auto-promoting tweets onto the timelines of people that aren’t followers.

The plan is, at least for the time being, aimed at those that lack advertising-savvy or are too lazy to implement their own strategies – hence why hasn’t been pushed to big brands. It differs from Twitter ads, where the user is in charge of creating and optimising their own campaigns, because it enables the user to continue tweeting as normal while Twitter automatically promotes some of those tweets.

As part of the beta program, those invited get to try the feature for free for a month. This will see up to the first 10 tweets each day promoted, though not every tweet will be pushed and the extent of promotion ‘may vary based on performance’. Retweets, replies and quoted tweets won’t be promoted but individual tweets cannot be turned off – so, it’s all a bit of a lottery really.

Tweets are promoted to people based on either their interest or metro area, but not both, depending on which is chosen by the user.

The move from Twitter could be in response to its eight per cent drop in ad revenues in Q2 2017, compared to the year prior. Although, it had plans for a very different subscription model earlier this year. Back in March, it was revealed that the microblogging platform was looking to introduce a plan for $19.99 – which would have been more-or-less an extended version of TweetDeck.