Twitter has officially announced Blue for Business, a subscription aimed at businesses looking to authenticate and differentiate themselves on Twitter. as the press release says. The service allows companies to link their main accounts to those of their employees, making it easier to prove that someone actually works for them.
The company is testing the service with “a select group of companies”, including its own employees. Esther Crawford, director of product management at Twitter, has a small bird badge next to her blue check mark confirming that she is an employee at the company, as you can see in this tweet of her announcement of Blue for Business. Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm, seems to have that too some employees are marked as affiliatesusing a badge with the corresponding logo.
So far, Twitter hasn’t shared many details about the service. We don’t know how much Blue for Business will cost, who is eligible, or how it will go to actually verify that a company is managing an account; Twitter’s Esther Crawford did not immediately respond to a query via Twitter. The company’s press release does state that it plans to have more companies sign up next year. Twitter does warn (in a really small footnote) that Blue for Business features may not be available on all platforms and that they “may change periodically”.
The game here for Twitter is obvious. The company is trying to make money through subscriptions, and creating what is essentially an enterprise tier of its Twitter Blue service could help with that. The company lists examples of the types of use cases it expects to see for Blue for Business: sports teams collaborating with their athletes, movie characters getting a logo next to their name, or journalists having a badge that shows they actually work for a specific outlet. (Although Twitter may have a hard time courting the press after some of its recent antics.)
