We know that Twitter believes that businesses are central to helping grow and monetize the microblogging service; recent integrations with Citysearch and LinkedIn have foretold its interest in the space. 
Today though, Twitter (
) has begun to take its biggest steps in providing new features to businesses and monetizing those features. In a blog post, the company announced that it has begun beta testing its first feature made specifically for businesses: “Contributors.”
An Explanation of the Contributors Feature
Contributors is a feature that focuses on creating more authentic engagement for business accounts. With Contributors, a business account with multiple contributors (say, for example, the @Twitter feed) can add the specific user that tweeted on behalf of the business to the byline.
Here’s Twitter’s explanation of the new feature in testing:
“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.”
The other big revelation by the company is that Contributors is just the first of several business features, some of which will be visible by users, and some which will be internal for businesses.
Twitter’s getting serious about ramping up its business presence. This may just be the beginning of the Twitter business model. We’ll have more answers soon enough.
Hat-Tip to Mashable.com
