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Twitter Appeals To Small Businesses With Big App

From Tweetdeck to Hootsuite, small businesses have plenty of ways to track their Twitter activity and audience behavior.

But that isn’t stopping Twitter from getting in on the act with a new Dashboard app for businesses.

The new app can track discussion about products and key words, as well as hashtags that don’t show up as “@” mentions.

“It gives business owners a clear picture of what’s being said about their businesses, lets them schedule tweets, and offers insights about their tweet performance,” Noah Pepper, a product and engineering manager at Twitter, notes in a new blog post.

Letting small businesses create custom feeds is an interesting idea. So now, for example, the owner of a coffee shop is more likely to see a tweet from a customer who has a question about his store’s hours.

Additionally, the owner of that coffee shop can now schedule tweets to reach her audience when she’s offline or busy making lattes.

If she wants to edit her scheduled tweets while she’s running around town, now she can use the iOS Dashboard app to update her tweet queue.

For Twitter, the new app is part of broader effort to engage small businesses. To that end, it’s working with Foursquare to let users see tweets from specific places, including businesses.

Yet, unfortunately for Twitter, catering to the needs of small- to medium-sized businesses has become a top priority for Facebook.

Among other efforts, Facebook continues to invest in its Places Directory -- which is essentially a local search engine -- and its Notification system, which now include recommendations for nearby places to eat, and local events.

Facebook is also in the process of positioning Messenger at the center of business-to-consumer communication.

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