To help business owners connect with their potential customers and fans, Twitter has announced the launch of yet another standalone application: Twitter Dashboard. Dashboard is aimed at SME businesses that want to use Twitter to connect with their customers and streamline engagement for business accounts. The app offers a suite of tools, including customized feeds of tweets, tools for scheduling posts, access to tips on what to tweet, analytics and more.
Similar to Twitter Engage, the idea with Dashboard is effectively to serve as a more personalized, custom destination and app for a specific group of Twitter users this time, small to medium-sized businesses. While larger corporations will likely continue to use their sophisticated tools from Twitter’s partners, the idea with Dashboard is to provide a more basic suite of business-friendly tools to a broader audience.
One of the key features Dashboard includes is the ability to monitor Twitter for posts about a business that go beyond those where people have tweeted directly to the business’s @username. Dashboard users can set up a custom feed that instead monitors for hashtags and keywords, like your business name or product names, for example. That way, businesses can view and respond to customers who are talking about them or asking questions, along with those who have actually mentioned the business’s Twitter handle, all in one feed.
Additionally, from the Dashboard website, businesses can set up a queue of scheduled tweets to reach their audience at the best time. The new iOS application, meanwhile, lets you also schedule, edit and reschedule these tweets while on the go.
Dashboard also helps businesses figure out what to say and which sort of posts work by offering tweet suggestions. For example, explains the Twitter blog post detailing this news, Twitter might suggest to an interior designer that they retweet some of their customers’ praises, or a restaurant might tweet something special about one of their team members — like the chef and some recent recognition he or she received.
Along with access to Twitter Analytics — a feature which already existed before Dashboard’s launch — businesses can begin to figure out how these tweets are working by measuring their impact. This is available both on the web and in the new client application. Analytics lets businesses see a range of information about their account, including top tweets and mentions, top media posts, top followers and more.
Though the focus of the Dashboard app is to make it easy to use these new tools, it also works as a Twitter client, allowing businesses to tweet, check and respond to direct messages, view their profile, reply, retweet and more.