Dive Brief:
- In a blog post, Twitter has announced the launch of Twitter Dashboard for small and medium-size businesses.
- The new feature includes business tools such as a Tweet scheduler and the ability to create custom feeds to track brand conversations and engage with customers.
- Twitter Dashboard is out in beta and available to all U.S.-based businesses immediately.
Dive Insight:
Although 2016 has been rough on Twitter with stagnant user growth, declining ad revenues, and disgruntled investors, the micro-blogging social platform has also been very active in rolling out new features to revive the company's fortunes. These include a major push into live streaming video and launching a new sticker feature for images shared on the platform. Now, Twitter wants to make it easier for small and medium-size businesses to manage their Twitter accounts.
“Large, dedicated teams typically have the advantage of sophisticated tools provided by Twitter ecosystem partners," Noah Pepper, product and engineering manager at Twitter, wrote about its latest new feature. "Today we’re offering a free tool to give all businesses an advantage in the way they use Twitter.”
If the new tools help business owners use the platform, Ad Week points out that it could also help Twitter increase engagement, something the company has been striving for in the last year. One intriguing feature built into the Dashboard is that it provides tips for tweets to help business owners make use of Twitter even when they aren’t sure what to tweet.
The blog post offered what this might look like in practice: “For example, if you work at a restaurant, a tip like, ‘Your team is as unique as your business. Tweet a surprising fact about one of your team members,’ might remind you to share some recent recognition your chef received. Or, if you’re an interior designer, seeing, ‘Share the love. Like and Retweet kind words from your customers,’ might prompt you to retweet a customer’s excited reaction to one of your recent projects.”