Twitter reached out to the enterprise market for the first time yesterday with the unveiling of Twitter 101, a web-based guide aimed at helping companies understand how to use the real-time microblogging service, including case studies that show how it can help a company’s business. Twitter has become an increasingly popular way for companies of all sizes — most notably Best Buy and Dell — to interact with customers and market services and products.
As Liz from NewTeeVee notes on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), “[C]ompanies are starting to figure out how to use Twitter for profit by building their own celebrity using the virality enabled by its publicness.” And as more businesses have started to dip their toes into the Twitter pool, developers have stepped in to help. Some of the best enterprise-focused Twitter applications currently available include:
- CoTweet — A collaboration platform that lets multiple people at a company send tweets on up to six corporate Twitter accounts and keeps all of them synced. The San Francisco-based startup that publicly launched in beta and received $1.1 million in funding earlier this month counts among its clients Whole Foods and Microsoft. In last week’s Twittergate documents, Twitter identified CoTweet as a company it may consider acquiring.
- Local Bunny — The Boulder, Colo.-based company’s eponymously named, $99-a-month service, which is aimed at smaller businesses, lets companies send automated responses to customers’ questions via Twitter.
- Buddy Media — The NYC-based company launched its new “Twitter Management System” service earlier this week; it helps brand advertisers keep track of trends and conversations taking place on the service, as well as click-through rates of links posted to it.
We’re sure to see many more, as Twitter’s audience continues to grow at a breakneck pace. The site had 21 million unique U.S. visitors in June, according to comScore, making it the third-ranked social networking site. While the release of Twitter 101 isn’t as exciting as, perhaps, the introduction of enterprise subscriptions, the new business-focused web guide shows that the folks over at Twitter HQ are cognizant of the opportunity they have with small businesses and large-scale corporations alike.
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