Twitter users in Australia will be among the first in the world to have access to the social media company’s paid subscription offering, featuring the ability to “undo” posts and customise the appearance of the app.
Late last week, the US-based company launched Twitter Blue, the first subscription service in its history.
The subscription, which is targeted at prevalent, “power” Twitter users, will cost $4.49 per month in Australia, with a handful of services on offer.
“We’ve heard from the people that use Twitter a lot, and we mean a lot, that we don’t always build power features that meet their needs,” Twitter product managers Sara Beykpour and Smita Mittal Guptal said.
“Well, that’s about to change. We took this feedback to heart and are developing and iterating upon a solution that will give the people who use Twitter the most what they are looking for: access to exclusive features and perks that will take their experience on Twitter to the next level.”
The flagship service from Twitter Blue is the Undo Tweet function, which comes following long-standing calls from users for the ability to edit typos in tweets after they have been posted.
But this new function won’t offer that, with it instead allowing paid users to use a customisable timer of no more than 30 seconds to take back a tweet before it is posted.
In effect, this function allows users to preview a tweet for a short period of time and make edits to it before it goes public.
Twitter Blue users will also have access to Bookmark Folders, allowing them to organise tweets they have saved, and a Reader Mode to make it easier to read long threads.
The paid users will be able to customise how the Twitter app icon appears on their phone, and access different colour themes in the app.
The Twitter Blue users will also have access to dedicated customer support, but the company has clarified that this will not provide expedited assistance to combat harassment and abuse in comparison to that offered to non-paying users.
Paid users will also still be presented with promoted tweets, the company said, and Twitter will continue to be free for all users.
“This subscription offering is simply meant to add enhanced and complementary features to the already existing Twitter experience for those who want it,” Beykpour and Guptal said.
Twitter Blue is part of the company’s wider goal to double its annual revenue to $7.5 billion by the end of 2023, as it announced in February.
The company also announced plans to reach 315 million monetisable daily active users in the same timeframe.
As of the end of 2020, Twitter had 192 million daily active users.
Twitter is also planning to double its “development velocity”, equating to an increase in the number of new features introduced by each employee that “directly drive either monetisable daily active users or revenue”.
Twitter has defined monetisable daily active users as “people, organisations or other accounts who logged in or where otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads”.
