Le Web Social de Pierre-Julien Grizel

CoTweet logo

Remember CoTweet, the company which raised $1 Million in october ? They decided to start serious (and profitable) stuff by charging no less than $1.500 a month for a supplementary service. What? $1.500 a month for a twitter client? While it’s not for the most of us, it seems like this move isn’t as awful as it seems at first.

Anyway, the free version will still exist — at least for a while.

[UPDATE: Added correct Co-Tweeted accounts for Microsoft]

An Enterprise-grade Twitter service

I’d really like to perform a full review of the CoTweet client service. I’m a subscriber. Basically, it’s twitter with business in mind. The special features over « traditional » twitter clients are :

• Multiple accounts for multiple people : you can have several persons in your company handle the same twitter account (usually it’s the contrary: one ‘people’ account handling several twitter accounts) ;
• Workflow support : you can assign tasks and tweets to specific persons in your organization ;
• Powerful notification and brand monitoring features ;

In my opinion it lacks a few services to be a real marketing platform, especially analytics to monitor stuff. Oh, life’s good, that’s especially what this paying version is all about.

Do you really want to pay? Yes. If you can’t afford something free.

What is the point of making such an expensive service? The answer is on the list of CoTweet customers : Pepsi, Microsoft, Ford, McDonalds. Well, I mean @pepsi, @microsoft (err, not that much see @mswindows, @ie, @bing, @microsofthelps), @ford, @mcdonalds. Not the kind of guys who can afford a free service. Not the kind of guys fond of Open-Source stuff, or at least, who do not precisely understand that economical model. A check is a contract, a contract is a guarantee.

They will pay because having a fully-operational service is critical for their marketing services. They can’t afford a free service.

Oh, and for the rest of us, they say it will remain free. At least for a while :

@shih_wei Don’t worry, the public beta will continue to be free and there will be other options at different price points. ^JE

No, we don’t worry :)

Anyway, I must say that CoTweet’s fundraising plus this emerging service albeit with a not-for-the-masses price tag seems like a very good thing for twitter and social media business.