Twitter for Business Services

Twitter, long the poster child for hype-heavy, profit-low Web 2.0 sites, may finally be seeing where the money is.

This week, Twitter started to roll out a business-friendly feature which may portend a direction of more corporate focused applications. With its new “contributors” feature, businesses are going to enable designated Twitter users to tweet on their behalf. Those updates would be labeled as being by a specific author.

The nitty-gritty behind what Twitter is doing is not the new feature, which is fairly benign, but what looks like to be the site’s first steps into a much more sophisticated system for business.

In screenshots of the new feature, Twitter offers a glimpse at its advanced settings, which allow businesses to offer enhanced levels of access for users.

But the settings also hint at a Twitter dashboard, which will ‘soon’ be available to users. This is where Twitter will find a selling point. If your business is able to access important analytics of the way other users interact with your tweets, you will be able to tap into quite a lot of valuable information.

Dial back to what Twitter has done up to this point, including enabling geolocation of Tweets and the list feature, and then you see how it adds up to the creation of a great storehouse of info for businesses. With these analytics, coupled with geo-tagged Twitter users, business will be able to see where clusters of followers or Retweets come, as well as where they are getting no traction. They may also be able to get very granular detail about followers, follower’s followers and so on.

This may be where Twitter comes in and tells businesses they can have this all for the low, low price for $X a month. Suddenly, for the geniuses behind Twitter, a business model.

And who knows where Twitter can go from here, once they show businesses that there is real data to be dug out of the 140-character service? Red tweets for Coca-Cola and blue tweets for Pepsi? There is much to be done with those few little words and Twitter is the only one to peek behind the curtain so far.