Twitter’s Plans: Reputation Score, Location Ads, Ping and More

Twitter has 370,000 people signing up as new users every day. With a robust user growth rate, Twitter can now better focus on its business model.

During the past few months, we have seen several creative ad products introduced by Twitter, namely @EarlyBird, Promoted Tweets and Trends. These products have enjoyed success and Twitter has plans to introduce more.

We have consolidated a quick list of products and features which Twitter might introduce in the future:

1. Location-based advertising: Co-founder Biz Stone told Bits that location-based advertising is one area that has great potential. Unlike Promoted Tweets, location-based ads are more relevant to local and small businesses. It will probably adopt a similar ad model like Promoted Tweets but with ads showing on tweet stream based on users’ location.

Every tweet is tagged with users’ location. Of course, users have the option to choose whether to be tagged, which could prove to be an obstacle if Twitter were to introduce location ads.

2. Ping integration: Last week, Twitter has released a video to demonstrate a possible integration with Ping, Apple’s music social network. As usual, the demonstration looks sleek but it remains to be seen whether users will embrace music discovery on Twitter.

3. Reputation score: In another interview with Bits, Co-founder Evan Williams said that Twitter calculates a reputation score for all its users. It isn’t clear how reputation score would affect the way we use Twitter and this score isn’t made public to prevent gaming. Perhaps Twitter would allow advertisers to target users based on their influence level in the future?

4. Analytics: Twitter analytics is reported to be available for all users by the end of this year. The analytics will provide users with real-time data that identify insights such as popular tweets or influential re-tweeters. With Twitter introducing its own in-house analytics, independent social media analytics companies would need to find ways to better Twitter’s service.

5. Tweet Filter: Even with all the plans on ad and business related products, user experience remains to be Twitter’s focus. Williams admitted that Twitter currently has an overwhelming amount of information and it is slowly becoming a problem for users. It is looking to filter out relevant content for its users. Hopefully a customizable filter similar to Facebook’s would be available to all users soon.