Twitter Starts Rolling Out Business Features with 'Contributors'

True to its previous statements, Twitter is starting to roll out the professional features it's been touting for a while now. At the moment, it's just a small feature which enables businesses to have multiple contributors to the Twitter account. These will be able to do all the things the administrator of the account can, most importantly, they will be able to tweet from the account, but their own name will be added to the byline. What's more, this is just an appetizer and Twitter is saying more business-related features are coming soon.

“As Twitter becomes more integral to businesses, they will need more business specific features from Twitter – both on the web and API. We have been working on some of these features and are ready to start a limited beta test of one that's further along in development,” Twitter explained. “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.”

Contributors is in beta for now and is the first feature geared towards businesses and professional accounts to be launched. If simple enough to use, Twitter account admins will be able to invite other Twitter users to contribute to the stream. These users will be able to have full control over the account including following people, direct messages and obviously tweeting.

This latest option is what many have been waiting for, many businesses already have more people posting to an account and, so far, it meant either having to share the credentials or using a professional tool like CoTweet. Now, the functionality is supported on the site but also in the API and it will be transparent as well, allowing readers to see exactly who wrote that particular tweet. Twitter is saying that it's working on several other features meant for businesses at the time, though it's not revealing any specific tools. Still, most should be close to being launch at this point. The Contributors feature is being rolled out in a private beta for now, but it will be available for all business users soon enough.