Willing to pay a Freemium?

Like a lot of businesses, we use Hootsuite to manage several Twitter accounts.

It has a lot of advantages over the Twitter web interface including the ability to pipe RSS feeds to your Twitter stream and allow multiple team members to collaborate in managing the accounts.

However, Hootsuite is now "going Freemium". Basic accounts will still be free, but the enterprise features such as multiple RSS feeds and team members will command a price.

The damage ranges from $4.99 per month for a package which allows multiple RSS feeds up to a truly eye-watering $1,499 per month for the enterprise package which allows you to have more than eight team members and various other goodies.

This has been on the cards for a while (after all Hootsuite were always going to need some kind of revenue stream) and the "Freemium" model is hardly revolutionary any more. Indeed, it seems likely to make increasing inroads into the legal market (see for example the recent Law Society Gazette article on whether the Freemium model could work in legal services).

However, I wonder how small businesses who use Twitter will react? Ning came in for a lot of flack from users when it decided to start charging earlier in the year and a couple of groups of which I am a member decided to relocate as a result. Will the same thing happen with Hootsuite..? after all it is a lot easier to move Twitter clients than to migrate a Ning group.

I have a gut feeling that 'Freemium' seems more attractive when you sign up for it at the start... and less so when it suddenly means paying for something which you have got used to using for free.

On the other hand, Hootsuite have to make money and you could argue that $50 per month is nothing compared to the benefits your business reaps from having access to an enterprise-grade tool to manage your Twitter presence.

What do you think? Are you going to move to a paid Hootsuite account or do you think this will lead to a mass exodus of business users?

Return of the portal?

Anyone remember the web portal craze around the turn of the millenium?

I am not the first to draw a comparison between this and the way in which some of the current crop of Twitter clients (Hootsuite and TweetDeck being the two I have used most) are expanding their reach to become more like "social media portals".

However, take a look at today's post on the Hootsuite blog announcing that "Just in time for SXSW" Hootsuite will be adding Foursquare and MySpace to the list of social networks it supports.

I'm not sure yet whether the Foursquare integration will be added to the Hootsuite iPhone App (so that users can check-in via Hootsuite on the go) or whether this is limited to seeing your friends' Foursquare activity via Hootsuite on the web. Either way, it is quite an interesting development.

Are we going to see a second round of the "portals war" as social media clients vye to aggregate your friends' activities across all the different social networks?

ps. on an unrelated note... if you are going to SXSW then my jealousy knows no bounds. Austin is a great city and with the addition of music and tech... Any tips for how I can persuade my firm that it would be a worthy use of my expense account would be most welcome!