Twitter Goes Business: Tests Contributor

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Twitter has grown into one of the hottest media for businesses to communicate with acquaintances and customers. This demands more business specific features from Twitter – both on the web and API. Currently there are business-oriented Twitter clients like CoTweet and HootSuite that allow multiple users manage a single account and assign tasks. Still Twitter needs to cover a lot of ground before it could turn its microblogging into a phenomenon for businesses. In a bid to boost their business centric communication Twitter appended a new feature Contributor. Twitter has begun beta testing for a for the new feature designed specifically to make business conversation more effective. The new inclusion would allow a section of employees to handle a single account for a big brand. It would be easier to tell who did what and offer more personal touch to interaction with customers.

This is what Twitter blog says about Contributor

it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.

That implies tweets will continue from the business’ Twitter account, but with a byline to credit the author. The company also announced that Contributor is the first in the line of business features that will be coming for users and some of it will be exclusively for businesses.

The Contributor functionality will be incorporated into Twitter’s API.  The new feature is expected to support third party apps and other existing apps.

With the latest feature and other business supportive features currently in development it can be anticipated that Twitter would allot exclusive business accounts to monetize its microblogging services.