Twitter has confirmed that they have started testing their new services aimed at businesses. The first, known as the Twitter Business Center, is already live and is being tested by a handful of companies.
The service has reportedly been in the beta testing stage since last December. Twitter started testing the service by inviting a few account holders to use the service and give Twitter feedback about it. Once Twitter is satisfied with the results and performance of the service it will be rolled out to all users.
A few business users were sent an email, which informed them about the new “Twitter Toolkit”. To start beta testing the service, users were asked to visit their Twitter account settings and then to click on the new ‘Business’ tab where they could provide information to help Twitter to verify the account.
Once a business activates its account by clicking on the email link, it gets automatically verified. The user can then activate the business features for that account. Business account users can provide information including contact details and size of the business – small, large, individual or group.
Activated business accounts show the verified logo on Twitter, which was. until now, available only to celebrities and extremely popular individual users. The benefit of a verified account is obvious – the follower knows for sure that he / she is interacting with an official company representative and not some imposter.
Verified business accounts show four tabs in the Twitter Business Center:
- Overview – general information about the business account
- Business Info – users can change the information was provided at the time of account verification
- Verification – confirms that the account has been successfully verified
- Contributors – allows the business to directly add multiple users to a business account.
In addition to the ability to allow multiple contributors within an account – a feature that was quite expected, given the success of coTweet – another notable feature of the new service is that it allows businesses to accept direct messages even from users whom they have not previously been following. This feature could be very helpful to businesses as far as receiving information and feedback is concerned.
Twitter has not given any indication of when it aims to bring the service out of beta and make it generally available, nor have they announced what the cost of this service to businesses will be.
