Paid for Twitter business accounts look set to launch

This was first hinted at in February of last year when Stone said: “We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

In the Summer he went a little further and said that Twitter was in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts and a set of build business-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs) that will create a “commercial layer” over the social network.

This is what we are now seeing. At the time Stone clarified and said that “Twitter will still be free for everybody…but we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit”.

Those things that are helping make businesses a profit will be the ones Twitter can charge for. It makes perfect sense.

Mashable today has some screen shots and an email that has been sent to a number of businesses who have been invited to participate in the beta programme.

At this stage the 'Twitter Business Center' only has a few of features. One of these is the very useful ability for business users to send direct messages to those that they don’t follow. This could be a major help on the customer care front.

There is no word on whether these accounts and features will be paid for, but the email sent to those on the beta programme, read as follows:

“Congrats!

Your account has been invited to participate in testing one of Twitter’s newest business-centric features, the Twitter Toolkit.

We’ll be rolling it out to you within the next few days (if you don’t have it already) for your business or organisation’s Twitter account.

To get started, visit your business’ Twitter account settings and look for the 'Business' tab. From there you’ll be directed to fill out some information which will help us verify your business or organisation.”