Lately, Twitter has been an integral force for businesses as a means of social media marketing (SMM) by helping companies expand and deepen their relationships with customers. With this growth comes the need for more business specific features, as evidenced by Twitter’s recent assimilations with social media sites Citysearch and LinkedIn. Yesterday, Twitter’s official blog has announced a beta feature for businesses called “Contributors.”
Contributors is a feature to help create a more authentic engagement with customers for businesses with accounts on Twitter. This feature allows businesses with multiple users to add the specific username that tweeted on behalf of the business to the byline.
Below is Twitter’s explanation, as well as an example, of the Contributors feature:
“The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – 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.”
Since this feature is still under development, Twitter is allowing some businesses to test the feature out and try to receive feedback from the users.
As mentioned in yesterday’s post, this may be Twitter’s expansion due to their exponential growth. Contributors is only one of several business features that will soon be readily available for businesses to use. Currently, some of these features are in beta testing and will be visible by all users, and some that will only be visible internally by businesses.
Since this is only the first of several features, Twitter has only begun to step up its business game. If you’re using Twitter for your social media marketing (SMM), make sure to stay tuned for any future updates on the business features.
Written by Chris C.
