According to Shearman of Marketing Magazine, Twitter is currently developing “Branded Pages”, which will be similar to Facebook Pages for brands. Details are scarce at the moment; however, these customizable pages will give brands more freedom to showcase content, and communicate with users.

It will be interesting to see how far Twitter is willing to go with branded pages. There’s a lot it can potentially do, including allowing brands to integrate rich media content, run promotions, and track performance through analytics. However, it will also have to do a careful balancing to ensure that user experience is not unfavorably affected.

“It seems interesting and a natural progression, but I’m interested in the features”, Nick Gonzales, VP of Operations at Nervora Digital Media Group in the UAE told ReadWriteWeb. Numerous brands, including the likes of Dell and Starbucks are already successfully leveraging Twitter to drive sales. If and when branded pages is launched, there should be quite a few takers for it.

Twitter is no longer the billion dollar product without an actual business model. Over the past couple of years it has managed to monetize itself through a series of promoted products (promoted trends, promoted tweets, promoted account etc.) and firehose access deals with search engines. However, there is obviously a lot more room for monetization. The biggest challenge for Twitter has been to find ways to monetize its service without irking its existing user base. However, in the recent past it has succeeded in annoying both users and developers through its #dickbar and #dickmove. Nevertheless, branded pages is something that should be a lot less controversial. In fact, it done right, it should turn out to be popular with both brands and users.