Twitter to Charge Businesses to Tweet?

Anyone who uses Twitter on a regular basis knows that following companies can be a double edged sword. On the one hand, you get to follow your favorite company’s tweets and keep up to date with the latest news. On the other hand, you risk having spammy updates on your page, pushing messages that actually matter further down the list.

With almost 1000 percent growth in the space of one year, you can’t blame companies for taking advantage when opportunity comes knocking. It’s a tweet eat tweet economy and access to such a huge market is without a doubt very tempting. However, reports today emerged claiming Twitter might be about to put a stop to companies using Twitter at no extra cost for commercial purposes.

According to Marketing magazine, co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone told the publication, "We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts."

Marketing then went on to ask VP of Communities and Conversations Bob Pearson what he thought of Twitter charging businesses for corporate accounts (in other news, Dell has a VP of Communities and Conversations) and Pearson pretty much said Twitter is handy because it’s easy and free but if that were to change, the company might find somewhere else to tweet. "If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere," he said.

We’re all in favor of companies paying for Twitter. Advertising costs money and Twitter is a micro-blogging/social networking site. If big name companies want to use it to sell their wares, they can fork over the same kind of cash they'd spend advertising anywhere else on the web. It's also nice to know that purging twitter of big name companies could be easy as making them pay cash for an account.

Check out the full story in Marketing magazine.