Twitter announces paid Super Follows to allow you to charge for tweets

Twitter announced a couple of great future features today: the ability for users to charge their followers for access to additional content and the ability to create and join groups based on specific interests. They are two of the most substantial changes on Twitter for some time, but they also fit perfectly into 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 give them access to extra content. This could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $ 4.99 a month to receive a number of benefits. Twitter sees this as a way to allow creators and publishers to be paid directly by their fans.

Direct payment tools have become increasingly important to creators, especially in recent years. Patreon has been a huge success and other platforms, including Facebook, YouTube and even GitHub, have launched direct payment features to the creator. Twitter will presumably suffer a reduction – the company has suggested subscription features that would offer it a new source of revenue – although it does not appear to have said what that fee will be yet.

Image: Twitter.

Twitter also announced a new feature called Communities, which appears to be its version of something like Facebook Groups. People can create and join groups around specific interests – like cats or plants, Twitter suggests – allowing them to see more tweets focused on those topics. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook (and a major moderation issue too) and can be a particularly useful tool on Twitter, since the open nature of the service can make it difficult for new users to start on the platform.

There is still no timetable for when any of these features will be released. Twitter listed them as “the future” of its platform during a presentation to analysts and investors this afternoon.