Listen up – Twitter Contributors is big. Real big. This is a landmark initiative from Twitter for your business Twitter social media mix.
In one if my previous posts I highlighted a problem that I believe exists for a business that uses Twitter – the engagement between a business and its customers via Twitter can be confusing.
In many cases the personal side of customer engagement is being lost whilst Tweeting. An individual’s persona is not being conveyed across to its customers.
This can be confusing or even frustrating for your customers. In other words you aren’t doing anyone any favours as your efforts are having a negative impact.
In that post I suggested a possible solution, that is to use a third party Twitter Client like HootSuite or coTweet.
Now however Twitter itself is in the midst of introducing a new feature called Twitter Contributors. Although not fully rolled out yet, it looks to be a very useful and beneficial Twitter feature that your business cannot ignore.
Twitter Contributors will enable a business to have a team of people Tweeting away individually. The stream of Tweets will be combined into one combined main flow thats attributed to the business itself.
Let’s look at an example of Twitter Contributors. The following is an example Tweet provided by Twitter. You can see that Twitter founder Biz Stone has an individual Tweet. However the Tweet is also attributed to the main parent Twitter account.
Again just to reiterate, the main account that this Tweet is associated with is Twitter. However you can see that Biz Stone is actually the person who authored the Tweet.
So there you go. Soon there will be no need for the likes of coTweet or HootSuite to facilitate an army of Twitter authors contributing to your Twitter content.
And therein lies another big trend that I predict we’ll see this year from Twitter. Twitter itself will erode away all the main advantages that third party Twitter clients currently enjoy. Twitter wants to control the Twitter interface, both web and client. Twitter Contributors is just the start of this shift. Just watch this space!