Twitter May Chirp Its Commercial Accounts Next Month

Twitter, it seems, has three ways to make money: ads, corporate accounts and data licensing. The company's ad model, which is based on search and seems to mirror the program developed by Google (GOOG), drew yawns from across the social media industry. Data licensing has shown new signs of life recently<. In October, Twitter inked $25 million in multiyear deals with Google and Microsoft (MSFT). At industry conference SXSW, word got out that Twitter has signed several more licensing deals, each likely worth six figures a month each. Commercial accounts, however, have been seen as having the most potential.

Under the commercial accounts model, premium users from the corporate world could pay for access to better analytics and other tools that would make Twitter a more effective marketing platform. The market for this service is vast, with the Fortune 500 making a strong showing on Twitter and everyone from Starbucks (SBUX) and Best Buy (BBY) to Deloitte to Aon (AON) and Munich Re (0KFE) advancing its agenda via the microblogging platform.

Twitter's head of product management and monetization, Anamitra Banerji, will be leading a session on commercial accounts at Chirp. Originally, the program was supposed to be off the ground by the end of 2009, but the rush to hire monetization professionals suggests that Twitter may have been constrained by manpower issues.

The principal concern right now is that Twitter would co-opt market share from development partners who have already developed analytical tools -- CoTweet, HootSuite and even Bit.ly, which offers some rudimentary retweet and click-through analysis in its free package, come to mind immediately. This wouldn't be the first instance of competition within the Twitterverse, as the company does compete with third-party applications for traffic (a mere 30% of interaction with Twitter occurs on the company's website.

These developers will probably be protected by the fact that they have broadened their reaches to other social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook. But, Twitter will retain the ostensible competitive advantage that comes with being the ultimate data source -- it seems safe to assume that the originator of tweet data will have the best stuff.

Also, according to VentureBeat, there have been hints that an ad model may be debuted at Chirp, but true to form, Twitter has remained mum.