Twitter Begins Trials of Business-focused Features

To thrive, Twitter must capitalize on the ability to help businesses interact with their customers. In this vein, Twitter has made a “Contributors” feature announcement on their company blog.

A “Contributor” is a feature that allows businesses to designate people’s names behind a corporate Twitter account for more authentic conversation. For example, if a company has a team of 5 people who tweet on behalf of the company, they most likely all send out tweets as @company_name. With Contributors, the person’s name can be appended as a byline on the specific tweet.

This feature is similar to a third-party called CoTweet. CoTweet allows a team to manage a company’s Twitter presence with features that mirror these new offerings from Twitter.

It’s great to see Twitter rolling out these new features as it points to sustainability for Twitter as a company. Twitter is a useful tool and platform, but without a business model and revenue stream, its future is unknown.