Twitter is really pushing their services towards business and influencers right now. They seem to have realised what use they can be to these groups of people and are offering apps and other things to help out. Last week we talked about Twitter Engage, the new app that could help celebrities or just semi-popular users on Twitter handle their analytics. Now Twitter is introducing Twitter Dashboard, a new app that allows companies to keep an eye on all aspects of their business on Twitter.
I can honestly say that the Twitter Dashboard looks pretty useful. There are a few different aspects to it, but one of those is a personalised feed for the business that allows them to see what users are saying about them. This does include the usual @ mentions, but it also picks up on general mentions of the company and products through hashtags and keywords. This is practical because it means you know what people are saying, even if they don't contact you. Some people just want to complain about a product, but not to the business that made it or provides their service. This feed means that you'll see those posts anyway and you can get a general view of how people see you and what you provide.
As well as this, the Dashboard website allows you to schedule queued posts and on the iOS app you can edit them throughout the day if something needs to be changed. This means that the app and the website can connect in different ways which can make the product useful if you're not good on your phone, but you are on the computer, and vice versa. As well as helping you arrange these posts, Dashboard can suggest the types of things you should post that will work. They might suggest you re-tweet something from a bigger business or suggest you mention something about one of your staff members that were celebrated elsewhere. It isn't going to write your tweets for you, but if you're stuck or don't have much to say that day, this might help. Dashboard also allows users to use the Twitter analytics within the app, but that was obviously going to happen here.
This app does work as a Twitter client so businesses can focus their Twitter activity through it rather than the main app. This might mean you can have more than one Twitter account signed in on your phone, but that's not certain. Twitter Dashboard has launched in beta in the US from now and is available here online or on iOS.