Twitter courts small businesses with a new 'Dashboard' app

Twitter is looking to get small business owners more involved in its service with its latest standalone app.

Similar to tweet-tracking platforms Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, the new Dashboard app lets businesses monitor chatter about products, key words or hashtags that might escape direct "@" mentions. They can also schedule a lineup of tweets, see a more detailed readout on how tweets perform and even get auto-generated suggestions for potential messages.

For instance, the app could surface a praising tweet from a customer that a business might have otherwise missed, then prompt the brand to retweet it or respond in a certain way.

While bigger brands with dedicated social media teams have access to more sophisticated tools through Twitter's partnership program, the free app is geared towards small and medium-sized companies that are just interested in the condensed, easy-to-use basics.

The result, however, doesn't look all that different from Twitter. The biggest addition appears to be an "About you" option that shows a wide range of mentions.  

It follows on the heels of last week's release of Twitter's "Engage" app, which provides celebrities and influential users with many of the same functions.

Facebook and Google, which currently dominate the mobile ads space, are able to lure small business owners with the promise of precise targeting, gleaned from the glut of information both collect on their users. 

While Twitter might not be able to match the hyper-specific advertising capabilities of those two platforms, it does have an advantage in that it's often a go-to public forum for customer service issues and product shoutouts (or takedowns).

Those testimonials are useful for brands looking to promote messages from satisfied customers, and the Dashboard app will help businesses more easily find them.

The app is currently available on the web and on iOS.

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