Spending long hours on Twitter can be profitable. In the past year, the microblogging platform has launched three new features that could help boost your bank account — if everything goes your way.
Super Follows let people subscribe to your content, while Tips let them show their appreciation with one-time payments. Finally, Ticketed Spaces gives you the option to pay an entry fee every time you stream audio from Twitter’s Spaces platform.
Most of these features are limited to certain users depending on location, operating systems and number of followers. However, if you meet the criteria for one or more of these factors, you can easily apply from your account and hope the dollar bills start rolling in.
How to make money with Super Follows
If you have a lot of followers, Super Follows can be a business opportunity for you. The idea is simple: you curate exclusive content that is only available to those willing to pay a monthly fee of $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99.
The challenge is finding a model that works for you, your brand, and your audience (Twitter have some ideas), but ultimately you decide which tweets are kept behind a paywall and which can fly free in the twitterverse. Each of your Super Followers will have a purple badge next to their screen name, so you can easily show your customers a little extra love.
The biggest hurdle to monetizing Super Follows is that the feature is currently only available on iOS and you’ll have to meet a long list of criteria to enter it. For starters, you’ll need to live in the US, be at least 18 years old, have at least 10,000 followers, operate an account that’s at least three months old, and post at least 25 tweets every 30 day.
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The company is actively reaching out to creators who are eligible to have Super Followers. But if you think you meet the criteria and haven’t received an invitation, you can proactively apply. In the mobile app, tap your profile picture, go to Settings and Privacyand then find Monetization. There, tap on Super Follow and work through the steps. Twitter will not email you about the status of your application, so you’ll need to return to this menu to find out if you’ve been accepted. Unfortunately, there’s no telling how long you’ll have to wait, or if there’s any way to appeal a rejected application, so try not to overdo it by checking the menu 11 times a day.
Now, for the most important part: the amount of money you will be able to earn. Of course, this will depend on how many people subscribe to your content and how much your subscription costs. Twitter says you will be qualify to receive up to 97 percent of what you make, which means the platform takes a 3 percent cut. But there’s a catch: this percentage only applies to earnings of less than $50,000 across the entire platform (ie, combining all the ways you make money from Twitter). Once your earnings exceed this threshold, the company’s cut increases to 20 percent.
And that’s not all. 97 percent of the earnings you qualify to take home are subject to in-app purchase fees charged by your operating system’s app store. Since Super Follows are only available on iOS right now, that means you have to subtract Apple’s 30 percent cut from that, which leaves you with a profit of about 67 percent of the revenue. However, this won’t be a problem for Android users, so once the feature is available for Google’s OS, it will become a tempting reason to switch to the other side of the mobile OS aisle.
How to get tips on Twitter
If you’ve ever clicked on a viral tweet, you’ve probably seen a response from the person who posted the tweet saying, “Wow! I didn’t expect this to blow up. Anyway, if you want to show some love, here’s how,” followed by a PayPal or Venmo account.
Monetizing social media requires creators to make the most of every sudden burst of exposure, but it’s hard work responding to your viral tweets. It’s so much easier to have a tip jar. Twitter announced this feature in May, and it basically consists of a button on your profile that your followers can click on to thank you financially for the A+ content and legendary memes you’re churning out.
When you enable this feature, you’ll see a tip button (looks like a stack of bills) next to it Follow the button. When other users click on it, they’ll see a list of all the payment services you’ve linked to your account. So far, Twitter supports Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal, and Venmo.
The biggest benefit of tipping on Twitter is that the company doesn’t take a cut, so you get 100 percent of the money your followers give you. But as you might have guessed, the feature has its limitations. At the time of writing, tipping is only available in the English version of the platform and only creators (a rather vague term), journalists, experts and non-profit organizations have the right to enable it. In one blog postthe company said they will expand to other languages and user profiles “soon,” but gave no timeline.
How to make money with ticket slots
In May 2021, after months of testing the feature with a limited number of users, Twitter launched Spaces. These are live audio rooms where users can host chats, monologues or even live replays.
To build on this new feature, Twitter announced Ticketed Spaces in August, allowing hosts to pay a fee (from $1 to $999) to access their live events on Spaces.
As with Super Follows, Twitter is testing this feature among a small number of users who meet one long list of criteria similar to the one that retains the Super Follow feature. In this case, you’ll also need to live in the US, be 18 years of age or older, have at least 1,000 active followers, have an account that’s been around for more than 3 months, and have hosted at least three events of Spaces in the last month. If you think you meet these criteria and haven’t received an invitation from Twitter, you can apply by tapping your profile picture in the mobile app, then going to Settings and Privacy, MonetizationAND Ticketed spaces.
[Related: You may actually qualify to use Twitter’s Clubhouse competitor now]
The revenue model for Ticketed Spaces is the same as Super Follows, except that it is available for both iOS and Android. This means iPhone owners will be able to get up to 67 percent of ticket sales, while Android users will get up to 97 percent. In both cases, this number is reduced if you earn more than $50,000 across the platform.
These three tools are fairly new to Twitter, and only time will tell if they’re here to stay or change dramatically once they’re available worldwide. Meanwhile, making a little money from some chaotic memes you were going to share anyway doesn’t sound bad at all. Even if it’s enough to buy a large latte once a month.
