Twitter Business Profiles?
Twitter Is Contemplating Business-Specific Profiles
Will Twitter Evolve Into A Local Marketing Tool?
This is a transcript of a segment originally aired on Episode 306 of the Beyond Social Media Show.
David Erickson: This week I got a survey, a Twitter customer survey request. When I get those I always do them because I want to see what they're asking customers and see what they're thinking. So, I went through it. And in it they asked my opinion on possible new Twitter features.
They've got a redesigned profile for your Twitter account and they're doing a comparison and asking what you thought of these different features. They have new potential features for a company in particular. So this would be a profile for a company as opposed to individual. They list the type of company it is. In their example, it's a pet store/shopping - retail. They have a verified badge; like journalists can have the checkmark, this would be a verified badge for a company. They have an expanded About section. So instead of listing like your--where you can put in your location--you have New York City, I have Chaska and Minneapolis and--
BL Ochman: Everyone knows where that is.
DE: Exactly. But in this case, it has the actual address of the location. It would have the hours of operation, like a traditional business listing. It's got a button for getting directions. It's got a button for clicking to call.
BL: Like Google.
DE: Exactly. So it looks like they're thinking more of these as business listings like Yelp and Google. They have a new section that would include this expanded information but then they swap out..one is an About section, another is a shop section. It would list products with pricing. Another is a gallery, presumably image galleries or video, I would suspect. Another is the app download section.
Specifically, they asked me to rate on a negative/neutral/positive scale how I felt about whether the new features would help as a:
- Showcase of content that my company curates
- Showcase of my company's products and/or services (e.g. link to app store, link to product page, etc.)
- Trending news and conversations about my company
- Link to my company's website
- Link to a location on a map (e.g. Google Maps)
- Show the business type of my company (e.g. shopping & retail, local restaurant, etc.)
- Other Twitter accounts that my company wants to promote
- Link to directly contact my company (e.g., phone number, customer service, etc.)
- Verification icon
- Customer reviews about my company
They're testing out these new potential sections of your profile to showcase the content that you're you're creating, showcase your products and services, reveal trending news about your company, show other affiliated Twitter accounts. So, you know, there's customer service accounts. You could see links to your location, directions, the phone number I mentioned. It's interesting, we'll put--I took some screenshots--we'll put those in the show notes to look at. But it does look like the direction that they're going in is more of a business listing type of type of addition as a new feature to Twitter for companies.