Last Thursday The Verge reported that Twitter is surveying users to gauge interest in a premium product that would include advanced analytics, breaking news alerts, audience insights and more. The premium features would be available through Tweetdeck, Twitter’s professional management tool. The Verge quoted Twitter’s survey to users:

“Twitter is considering offering an advanced TweetDeck experience, with more powerful tools to help marketers, journalists, professionals, and others in our community find out what is happening in the world quicker, to gain more insights, and see the broadest range of what people are saying on Twitter. Whether you use Twitter for work or just want to be more informed on the latest news, sports, entertainment, political viewpoints, and information in today’s world, this advanced TweetDeck experience will be designed to help you get even more out of Twitter.

This premium tool set will provide valuable viewing, posting, and signaling tools like alerts, trends and activity analysis, advanced analytics, and composing and posting tools all in one customizable dashboard. It will be designed to make it easier than ever to keep up with multiple interests, grow your audience, and see even more great content and information in real-time.”

Andrew Tavani, managing editor for The New York Times’ Women in the World, tweeted about it on Thursday, sharing a screenshot of what an enhanced Tweetdeck with premium Twitter features might look like, as well as a complete list of features and pricing. According to Tavani, the price point is $19.99 a month for features including:

• Exclusive priority customer support
• Exclusive news and alerts personalized for the user
• Advanced publishing features
• Ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts
• An ad-free Twitter experience
• Enhanced tools for managing and creating customer audience lists by interest, customer, region, etc.
• Ability to import user lists from outside sources
• Ability to access the service on desktop and mobile devices
• Secure access to manage the account across team members
• Customization

Feedback to Tavani’s posts were positive with users excited about the features but not the price, and others comparing the new and improved Tweetdeck to what HootSuite offers.

As Nieman Lab and Twitter users point out, some of these advanced features are already available through other services. HootSuite, for example, allows users to manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard. SocialFlow is another third-party social media management tool that helps users, especially publishers, reach the largest audience possible by predicting the best visibility and publishing social media posts in real time. SocialFlow also helps users, brands and publishers monetize their posts through social media advertising. Twitter is among the social media platforms it supports.

Insider Take:

As a niche publisher, we use Twitter directly as a live tool to engage with our audience. We also use HootSuite to schedule tweets, both informational and promotional, in advance. For our purposes, the two combined meet our needs, but the advanced features are attractive, and we can see how they’d appeal to other subscription businesses, especially publishers who are producing fresh content daily 24-7.

Will a paid Twitter product be viable though? From the standpoint of a subscription company, it is good to test new products from time to time and to gauge interest before making an expensive investment. It is also smart to consider other revenue streams as social media platforms and other outlets compete for dollars and eyeballs.

We see advantages to this new product, but we hope Twitter will carefully consider the unique and exclusive features an enhanced Tweetdeck can offer. It must differentiate itself from the other players and offer something of value to users. It seems likely that some users will pay for advanced functionality and an ad-free experience will attract others. The question is finding the right mix of features at the right price point to make the investment worthwhile to Twitter and its end users.