Twitter launches certified products to help businesses tweet smarter

Do you need help engaging with your customers on Twitter, making sense of what users are saying and understanding your followers so you can make sure you actually share content they’ll find valuable? Well, you’re in luck. Twitter has just made your life easier… or, at least helped some businesses building tools for the platform get a stamp of approval and extra attention.

In an official blog post, Twitter’s business development manager Doug Williams announced the company’s new certified products program, which is designed to make it easier for brands to identify third party services that can help them manage their online reputation and official accounts. The program includes a list of twelve tools designed to help businesses in areas like social media management, monitoring and analytics. The partners are organised into three categories:

1. Engagement: Tools which help businesses interact with their followers and respond quickly to any customer complaints or negative publicity.
2. Analytics: Partners which measure the level of activity on Twitter so companies can easily understand exactly what people are saying about their brand.
3. Data reseller: Tools involved with gathering and monitoring data from the social media site.

So, which partners made the list? Just HootSuite, Attensity, Crimson Hexagon, Dataminr, DataSift, ExactTarget, Gnip, Mass Relevance, Radian6, SocialFlow, Sprinklr and Topsy so far, but others can apply for certification if their service meets Twitter’s guidelines and falls within its specific areas of interest.