Twitter announces paid Super Follows to get you paid for tweets

Twitter announced some great features today: users can ask their followers for access to additional content, and the ability to create and join groups based on specific interests. This has been one of the most important changes to Twitter for a while, but it also fits in well with models that have been popular and successful on other social platforms.

The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to charge followers and access additional content. This could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscribing to a newsletter or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $ 4.99 per month to receive a range of benefits. Twitter sees this as a way to get creators and publishers paid directly by their followers.

Direct payment instruments have become increasingly important for creators, especially in recent years. Patreon has been very successful, and other platforms including Facebook, YouTube and even GitHub have all introduced features for direct creative payment. Presumably, Twitter will cut back – the company alluded to subscription features that would provide a new source of revenue – although it apparently has not yet said what the fee will be.

Image: Twitter.

Twitter has also announced a new feature called Communities, which is apparently something like Facebook Groups. People can create groups and join specific interests – like cats or plants, Twitter suggests – so they can see more tweets focusing on these topics. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook (and also a great deal of moderation), and it can be a particularly useful tool on Twitter, as the service’s open nature can make it difficult for new users to get started on the platform. .

There is no timeline for starting any of these features yet. Twitter called it ‘what’s next for its platform this afternoon during the presentation to analysts and investors.