How Might Twitter’s New Business Center Change Small Business’ Social Networking Practices?

Twitter has been quite busy as of late, making several moves to enhance and monetize its popular micro-blogging platform.  Some of the latest news to come out of the camp involves Twitter Business Center, a new service designed to help brands better communicate with their audience.  In this article, we will have a closer look at the new service and the implications it could have on social networking practices for the small business. 

When using the Twitter Business Center to create an account for your small business, the account is automatically verified, and that verification is put on display for all to see.  This is very important as it lets your followers know they are dealing with a credible, and reliable source when communicating with your brand.  Automatic verification is perfect for small businesses, as large companies often maintain multiple Twitter accounts to segment their communications accordingly.  At this point, it is unknown whether businesses will be able to set up more than one account so smaller companies can definitely take advantage. 

Included in the Twitter Business Center is a function that allows multiple contributors to be added to a single account.  This is similar to how Facebook allows more than one person to act as administrators of a fan page.  The ability to have multiple contributor gives a small business the opportunity to have different voices for the brand, which can result in benefits from a personality aspect when it comes to communicating with consumers.  If your business uses Twitter as a customer service tool, a feature such as this could really come in handy.  For example, you might allocate one contributor to field general customer inquiries, and another to handle troubleshooting issues.  Because it associates individuals with Twitter posts, small businesses can also make sure all employees are held accountable for the tweets they make.

Prior to the launch of Twitter Business Center, consumers who wanted to communicate with a brand directly where required to follow that brand, and then hope that the business would follow them to establish a relationship.  As we have all learned, following someone on Twitter doesn’t necessarily mean they will return the favor by following you.  That process has all changed with the Business Center, which allows a user to directly communicate with a company as long as they are following them.  This particular feature facilitates private communications, which could potentially lower the number of conversations about the brand, be it positive or negative, that show up in public searches.  It could also help generate more feedback from consumers who may not be comfortable expressing their concerns on a public platform. 

Twitter has rolled out the Twitter Business Center in beta and it is currently only available to a small group of select businesses.  The new tool looks as if it could be quite valuable for small businesses leveraging the micro-blogging service, so it will be interesting to see the feedback coming in from brands that got to give the service a test drive.