Inc.:
Twitter is open for business.
The social network isn’t charging anybody for anything yet, and isn’t making any money — apart from the $100 million in venture financing it recently raised. But the San Francisco, Calif., start up is headed in that direction, with plans to offer paid commercial accounts later this year.
Over the past few months the little company with the big social network has been making itself over to be more business friendly.
The changes come at a time when many small businesses are figuring out what Twitter can do for them. One example is iContact, a Durham, N.C., e-mail marketing software maker with 180 employees and 50,000 customers that started using Twitter for customer service about a year ago. “When our site is down, we tweet out updates every 20 minutes to keep the community informed,” says Chuck Hester, iContact’s communications director. “We answer questions for customers, and then take them off line to complete the customer-service process.” Currently five iContact marketing and communications department staff members and the company’s CEO have Twitter accounts, “to help with consistency of our message,” Hester says.
To reach more businesses such as iContact, Twitter’s unveiled a formal outreach program that starts at the company’s virtual front door. The site’s home page has been redesigned to display a search window and a list of trending topics — all the better to show potential users how the network can be used to do real-time searches on what people are talking about.
Photo by Twitter.