Twitter have released a new app that could help make it easier for businesses to engage with social media users. Dashboard focuses on providing easy-to-understand insights and actionable advice, all of which are designed for businesses who want to expand their community.
Twitter announced Dashboard in a post on their blog, describing it as a “powerful tool designed to help businesses connect with their customers and community”. At the time only available to business users within the US, three key advantages were listed on the blog; “Easily engage with your following… Tweet when the time is right… [and] Get tweet ideas and inspiration.
Notable features and their uses
The three advantages mentioned on Twitter’s blog make it clear that through creating the app the network are eager to compete with scheduling platforms and management tools favoured by power users. Engagement-focused feed development and scheduling features are fairly typical of apps of this kind, so the most interesting are the “tweet tips” tailored to allow you to “kick-start your creative process”.
The Dashboard app takes users through a quick process that helps craft a customised feed tailored to their business and industry. The system then combines mentions, hashtags and keywords to provide an easily accessible feed for monitoring brand and industry discussion with interaction in mind.
Creative tweet suggestions are offered with the user’s business in mind, clearly to help new users begin to utilise the network to it’s fullest potential. Twitter included the below example in their article:
For example, if you work at a restaurant, a tip like, “Your team is as unique as your business. Tweet a surprising fact about one of your team members,” might remind you to share some recent recognition your chef received. Or, is you’re an interior designer, seeing “Share the live. Like and Retweet kind words from your customers,” might prompt you to Retweet a customer’s excited reaction to one of your recent projects.”
Twitter have come under fire in recent months for being inaccessible for new businesses and users, one of the main reasons cited for their fiercely declining user growth rates. Therefore it is great to see the network providing features designed to combat this and allow new users access to the unrivalled potential for interaction and outreach that it provides.
