Many people have asked us about Twitter’s planned commercial account offering and what it means for CoTweet. Twitter has been planning for commercial accounts for a long time. Today Anamitra Banerji from Twitter’s Product Team posted to their blog that Twitter is testing one of its new features, ‘Contributors’. We figure now would be a good time to shed a little light on how CoTweet will be working with Twitter to extend the functionality of commercial accounts as they’re rolled out.
CoTweet’s Multi-Author Functionality is Strengthened
CoTweet was the first company to recognize that businesses would require the ability to have more than one person tweeting through a brand Twitter account. We discovered this need through our own use of Twitter and designed this as a feature of CoTweet at the very beginning. We gave a lot of thought to how brands should represent themselves on Twitter and outlined our philosophy in our inaugural blog post: Making Brands Human on Twitter. Not only did we provide a tool, we also suggested a convention–that companies reveal the people communicating behind the brand and sign off on tweets. Much to our delight, this convention has been widely embraced by companies like Ford, Microsoft, Salesforce, and even Twitter itself. We knew from the outset that the approach of incorporating cotags, the ‘people behind the brand’, into the Twitter background was a little kludgy and that one day there would be a more elegant solution. Fortunately, that time is approaching. CoTweet is working closely with the Twitter API team to incorporate the new contributor API, which will further enhance CoTweet’s current multi-author functionality.
CoTweet’s Value Add
While we aren’t at liberty to discuss the details of Twitter’s commercial offerings, it’s clear that there will be a continued need to provide collaboration tools necessary for businesses with cross-functional teams that communicate through one or more brand accounts. Businesses will continue to require functionality such as CoTweet’s advanced work flow and conversation history that allow them to engage in authentic, two-way dialogs with their customers and communities–responding to inbound inquiries and reaching out with news and information of value to their customers. They will require increasingly sophisticated means for managing dozens–and in some cases hundreds or even thousands–of Twitter accounts across the enterprise. There is a large area of opportunity between what Twitter will be offering and what businesses require. CoTweet will continue to develop enterprise-class functionality on top of Twitter’s commercial account APIs.
Twitter is Committed to the Success of its Ecosystem
It is worth pointing out that Twitter has repeatedly stressed its commitment to fostering a thriving ecosystem of applications built on top of its platform. CoTweet’s strong relationship with Twitter has been highlighted in recent weeks by Twitter leadership at conferences such as TechCrunch Realtime CrunchUp, Supernova and Le Web. Video clips from those events are included below.
- Dick Costolo at TechCrunch Realtime CrunchUp on 11/20 (full video)
- Dick Costolo at Supernova on 12/2 (full video)
- Ryan Sarver at Le Web on 12/9 (full video)
CoTweet has always enjoyed a close working relationship with Twitter–at all levels of their organization. The CoTweet team has provided feedback on new features, assisted in troubleshooting challenges with the API, and has shared insights related to CoTweet’s core target audience: businesses.
Twitter has been a great partner to CoTweet, supporting and encouraging us at every step of the way. We have every reason to expect our partnership to flourish as our companies roll out complementary fee-based services to businesses.
6 Comments
Great Post Jesse. Makes a lot of sense. Very analogous to what we’re experiencing at Inigral with Facebook recently launching the functionality to segment the audience of a Page’s wall post. Thanks for your insight!
Posted by Tony Zanders on December 14, 2009 at 4:36 pm | Permalink
Good thought getting ahead of this story. I think you’re right – this feature should make CoTweet stronger. Whatever Twitter is building, I assure you it won’t be the stream management solution for everyone. There will be plenty of market to go around, provided Twitter keeps playing nicely…
Posted by Eric on December 14, 2009 at 5:02 pm | Permalink
Twitter’s new business features are a step in the right direction for the platform and as you point out- its a further evolution of their ecosystem. When Twitter opened up their API, their user adoption rate skyrocketed with the help of partners. I see similar business growth coming from these new features which will be built on by partners such a CoTweet. This is good for the industry as a whole and is going to foster a lot more innovation (just look at the Twitter Client market on the iPhone for evidence of this). This is going to benefit business users like ourselves who are trying to get our message out more effectively and efficiently using Twitter. We’re looking forward to seeing what’s to come!
Posted by Tim Van Loan on December 14, 2009 at 5:49 pm | Permalink
Today is the first we’ve heard of CoTweet and it sounds like what we’ve been looking for. We currently have 2 people sharing our corporate account which works okay for us since one is in Australia and one is in the US. Even if we repeat some tweets, it’s ok because of the time difference. But we are trying to encourage more employees in the US and this looks like a good solution for us.
Posted by adine on December 15, 2009 at 8:51 am | Permalink
The features you offer are a must for businesses of all sizes. I like that this organizes the business strategy for being on Twitter in the first place. I’d like to see analytic tools and customer service tools. I think those are important for both handling customer posts, for understanding employee time (costs) and for understanding the value of Twitter to the business.
Posted by Mark on February 17, 2010 at 9:40 am | Permalink
Nice work on the Contributors integration! Lots more where that came from. Looking forward to continuing to enable and enhance the ecosystem.
Posted by anamitra Banerji on February 18, 2010 at 6:01 pm | Permalink
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