A quick update for brands on Twitter – SMBs won’t have to sign up to the new $1000 per month Verification for Organizations program to get a gold checkmark in the app.
Twitter’s been pushing for brands to confirm their official presence by signing up to the program, but according to Twitter chief Elon Musk, there’s also a cheaper version in the works for SMBs, which will also provide a form of in-stream verification for their account.
We will have a lower cost tier for small businesses, but need to manage the onboarding of organizations carefully to prevent fraud.
The $1000/month is meant for larger organizations.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2023
So it won’t cost $1000 per month for all businesses to get verified, just big businesses, as per Musk.
Which seems like the sort of detail that Twitter could have communicated as part of the introduction of the program, but external comms are very clearly not a priority for the new Twitter team.
So, you will have options, if indeed you are considering verification in the app. I’m not sure that most brands will need it, but if you get referrals from tweets, or you’re looking to maximize your tweet exposure (tweets from verified accounts are now prioritized in the ‘For You’ feed and in replies), it’s something to think about.
Twitter’s push to make subscriptions a bigger source of revenue for the company isn’t currently going as well as Musk and Co. would have hoped, with fewer than 0.33% of Twitter users signing up to Twitter Blue, and few organizations willing to pay the hefty $1000 per month fee. Twitter’s sought to enhance its desirability by gifting verification to thousands of big-name celebrities and brands, but even that hasn’t led to a significant boost in subscription take-up as yet.
The problem is, the incentive just isn’t there for people to pay – especially when you also consider that the majority of users don’t tweet, meaning that reach boosts hold virtually no value to them.
For brands, that’s a different equation, because they do want maximum reach. But $1000 is far too much for most to consider, when matched against the business value that it’ll likely provide.
But maybe, at lower price tiers, it could become a more viable consideration. And with Twitter also restricting Twitter ads to verified accounts only, that’s another factor to build in.
It’ll just depend on how much cheaper SMB verification actually is, and what’s on offer in that package. Given Twitter 2.0’s changes to its API pricing, I wouldn’t hold out hope for a hugely discounted offering, but we’ll let you know when more info is available.
