Skip to main content

Twitter profiles for businesses just got way more useful

Business accounts on Twitter now have a way to put their (fairly detailed) contact information front and center on their Twitter profiles.

On Thursday, the Twitter Business Twitter account announced via a tweet that the bird app’s Location Spotlight feature will as of today be available globally, to “any professional.”

Recommended Videos

https://twitter.com/TwitterBusiness/status/1555207046177366017

If you’re unfamiliar, Location Spotlight is a feature in which businesses with a physical location (and a Twitter account), can share their actual address to their Twitter profile page so that customers can find them. And according to Twitter’s blog post announcement about the newly globally-launched feature, Location Spotlight also lets businesses display their business hours, “and additional contact information so that customers can reach them via phone, text, email, or Twitter Direct Message.” Plus, there’s also support for Google Maps, so that businesses can include a map of their location and get directions to that location.

The Twitter Business Twitter account (@TwitterBusiness) already has its Location Spotlight up and running on its own profile page.

The Twitter Business twitter account's profile page with its Location Spotlight.
screenshot

Selecting the Get directions option within Location Spotlight (as seen in the screenshot above) automatically opens Google Maps directions in another browser tab (if you’re on desktop web). And if you select Contact on the Location Spotlight for Twitter Business, a pop-up menu appears with the option to open a Twitter Direct Message conversation with Twitter Business.

Selecting these options on the mobile app for Android yields similar results, although selecting Get directions in the Android app doesn’t open a browser tab, but instead the Google Maps mobile app.

Anita George
Anita George has been writing for Digital Trends' Computing section since 2018. So for almost six years, Anita has written…
Twitter API broke links, images on the website this morning
A stylized composite of the Twitter logo.

Twitter broke in several places this morning, likely due to Twitter's own API. Slow load times, broken links, and services like TweetDeck went down on Monday, displaying an error related to Twitter's API. This is not the first hurdle Twitter has seen due to its API under the new leadership of Elon Musk.

When using a link on Twitter or accessing a service like TweetDeck, you would see this message: "{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}" That's not too helpful -- going to the website address in the error would take you to a page with the same error.

Read more
Twitter will soon be a bit less irritating for many people
Twitter logo in white stacked on top of a blue stylized background with the Twitter logo repeating in shades of blue.

With or without Elon Musk at the helm, Twitter can’t seem to decide what it wants to do with its algorithmic timeline, currently branded as “for you,” which shows tweets it thinks you'll like, whether or not you follow the tweeter.

For years it’s been messing about not only with the algorithm but also with the extent to which it forces the timeline on users.

Read more
Thanks to Tapbots’ Ivory app, I’m finally ready to ditch Twitter for good
Profile displayed in Ivory app

Ever since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, it’s been one chaotic new thing after another. You literally cannot go a day (or a few days or even a week) without some stupid new change to the site — whether it’s about checkmarks for verified or Twitter Blue subscriber accounts, how links to other social networks are banned and then reversed, view counts on Tweets, or something else. I can’t keep up with every little thing that has happened since the beginning of November, and it feels like the spotlight is always on the toxicity of the site in general.

New Twitter alternatives have been popping up recently, but it seems that the most popular one continues to be Mastodon. I originally made a Mastodon account back in 2018 when it first launched, but it never clicked with me back then, and I eventually went back to Twitter. With the Musk mess, I tried going back to Mastodon, but again, it didn’t really click with me — until Tweetbot developer, Tapbots, revealed its next project: Ivory.
The significance of Tapbots and Tweetbot

Read more