Twitter to launch first of services aimed at businesses

Twitter founder Biz Stone revealed in October that the microblogging service would begin offering commercial services this year as part of its efforts to generate revenues.

The first business service, which is to be tested among a small group of users, is called Contributors and allows businesses with multiple people using a single account to add their own user name or byline to an individual tweet.

For example if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz. The idea is that users will know more about the real people behind business or organisations they are talking to.

The company said the move was about making Twitter more personal. Writing on the Twitter blog, Anamitra Banerji from the product team said Contributors would enable users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses.

Banerji said: "The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective. After we kick the tires a bit, we'll do a full launch to all business users and ecosystem partners."

Twitter said the feature was one of "several in development". Some of these new business-oriented services will be visible to regular users and some of them will not.

Other planned services are thought to include analytics tools that Biz Stone talked about in October.

Stone said: "You'll be able to pay for an additional layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account."

In November, Twitter Japan signalled that it might introduce a tiered payment model that would charge audiences to view tweets from premium Twitter accounts. The company later denied that it was about to introduce the charging plan.