Pay with a Tweet (or other social payments) in the Freemium world

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Hi Mozer(s),

I work for a company which provides cloud-based collaboration environments for companies. Like many companies in this field, we offer a Free package, which gives users enough capabilities to explore our tool under business-alike circumstances.

However, we currently dont have a time limit for our free version - which, makes us (I think) quite unique from a competitive standpoint. But consequently, it also means a lot of users see no immediate need to upgrade to a business package.

If maintaining this business model, we are considering various options in how to generate more awareness. The company is quite new and can generally only get better results of SEO and social media advancement.

One alternative is to start charging for signup to the Free package, using Social payments scheme, i.e. get access to the collaboration tools for free if liking, tweeting, plusing us, using a pre-defined message, hashtag, etc, using a hybrid approach, allowing users to edit some/all of the message.

It may have an impact on number of sign ups, but are there other potential negative effects? I have seen some comments, both positive and negative, about its SEO impact, mostly positive, not least from this [Youmoz post](How To: Win Tweets and Influence Search Engines with PayWithaTweet).- though unlikely to have a direct SEO effect, it can increase sharing, exposure and SERP presence. But any flip sides social payment users should be aware of?

Thanks in advance.

[Asher]

If your tool is beneficial to the average user, most people will not have a problem signing up for it at the cost of a like, tweet, or plus.  Also, in terms of SEO, there should be no negative impact. The only thing that might end up being negative is the initial sign up which might spike your rankings, mainly because google might think you to be relevant to what is currently being discussed, and then a sharp decline.  But that would be the only downside I could think of.

I hope this helps.

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Thanks Jason for your kind reply. You are basically saying that we are not worse off - the decline is a mere adjustment to "reality" again. We have at least increased our potential awareness factor.