By: Nick Gambino
Twitter has been going through a rough patch as of late, or rougher than usual. Elon Musk famously, or notoriously, bought the company a couple months back and instantly started making some less than popular changes. The most controversial of which was offering a subscription service, Twitter Blue, for those interested in purchasing one of those little blue check marks.
Twitter Blue fetches a mere $7.99 a month, giving you a fast lane to verification and a lot fewer ads in your feed. In other words, those little blue check marks used to mean something, but now that you can buy them, it just means you can afford 8 bucks a month.
Twitter has announced they’re testing Blue for Business, further expanding the verification program for companies. Despite its name, pages subscribed to Blue for Business will receive a gold check mark, letting people know they are a corporate entity at a quick glance. They’ll also sport a square profile photo instead of the traditional circle photo.
A Blue for Business subscription also allows companies to hand out badges to their employees so you can see who works for them. This will come in handy when you’re quickly skimming through a thread and want to see who in that conversation represents the company.
“As a Twitter Blue for Business subscriber, a company can link any number of their affiliated individuals, businesses and brands to their account,” a Twitter blog post states. “When they do, affiliated accounts will get a small badge of their parent company’s profile picture next to their blue or gold checkmark.”
Separately, governments or those who work for governments will receive a gray check mark. The same goes for multilateral organizations like UNICEF. They’ll retain the traditional circle photo. The list of labels and different changes are many, but you can read about them on this Twitter support page.
The point is to create more of a network on the social platform, instead of the disjointed wasteland it has been.
“Businesses can affiliate their leadership, brands, support handles, employees or teams,” the blog post reads. “Journalists, sports team players or movie characters can be affiliated. You name it, we got it.”
We’ll have to wait and see how this all affects the bottom line (the purpose of all these changes). While there are those who have jumped ship as they don’t agree with Elon Musk’s new direction, it’s impossible to know exactly where it’s headed until it gets there.
