Twitter targets small business accounts, launches Dashboard app

To help business owners connect with their users, micro-blogging website Twitter has launched “Twitter Dashboard” – an app to streamline engagement for business accounts. “Available on web and iOS version, Dashboard includes features that have popped up in other Twitter products in the past. In both versions, Twitter guides you through a quick process to create a custom “About You” feed tailored to show tweets about your company or business,” Technology website Engadget reported. The feed takes into account what type of business you are running, then combines mentions and keyword searches to find people talking about your brand, even if they do not tag your handle directly, the report said. On Tuesday, Twitter added a new feature that would let a user add virtual stickers to photos by just searching them like hashtags. The company is also creating collections of stickers that are linked to the time of year and events such as New Year and Christmas. The new feature was similar to adding a sticker to a Snapchat post where a user can resize, rotate and add multiple stickers to each post. Twitter’s management has been doing everything to get the company back on its feet. Recently, it acquired 18-month-old London-based startup Magic Pony Technology to expand its capabilities in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). The announcement came a week after Twitter invested $70 million in popular music streaming service SoundCloud to push its stalled growth amid rumours that technology giant Google might soon acquire the company. The 10-year-old Twitter has been facing stalled user growth and growing competition for quite some time. A sequential decline in its monthly active users (MAUs) base triggered a sharp fall in Twitter shares as the company announced its fourth quarter results recently. IANS