By @myx
- Terms
- Background
- Current Contributors Feature
- Extending the Contributors Feature
- Within this document, a user is any Twitter user.
- The platform means any service offered by Twitter, including the website, mobile site and the API.
- An account is just what you’d expect it to be: any Twitter account.
- Somebody replying to thematic questions via Twitter is a supporter.
- An admin refers to a user who has the username and password for an account. He has the intention of sharing access to the account with other people.
- A contributor is a Twitter user who has been given access to an account by an admin.
- Permissions are actions related to the platform, such as publishing and removing tweets, sending and reading direct messages, changing account settings, and so on.
Over the last years, Twitter has become an essential part of many people’s lives. In addition to the communication within friends circles, Twitter has also become an important marketing platform for brands, as it offers one of the most direct ways to reach the target audience and get instant feedback.
This is why many companies have resorted to using Twitter as a support channel for quickly resolving minor customer problems, or for pointing to extended help locations. This strategy has also been adopted by Twitter itself, where @support along with its localized accounts (such as @hilfe for German) focuses on actively helping users.
While some brands only have a small user base whose support enquiries can well be handled by a single supporter, this model doesn't scale well for larger companies, such as Microsoft. Of course, registering several accounts for the company is not an option, as it is dissatisfying for the company to offer more than 1 point of help and support communication on Twitter. Thus, sharing one central support account with multiple supporters is necessary.
On the other hand, the account admin will not be happy with handing out the account password to each and every supporter.
- This would open up the account—and so the company—to compromise.
- Also, if the admin would share the credentials with other people, he would lose control over who has which permissions on the account.
- A third disadvantage of multiple people logging in with the same data is that customers would no longer be able to distinguish with whom they are talking via the account (all tweets are just labeled as coming from ‘account’).
Several third-party Twitter webservices have recognized the need for shared access to Twitter accounts. For example, one of them was CoTweet, now replaced by the paid SocialEngage.
However, all of these third-party solutions fall short in terms of:
- they are not directly integrated into Twitter
- they can only be accessed and used via the programmer’s own tool(s)
Subsequently, there is a need for an experience directly created by Twitter itself:
the Contributors feature.
The basics for the Contributors feature have already been developed by Twitter, while the feature as-is has never been advertised publicly. In fact, Twitter is using the current version of the Contributors feature for some system accounts, such as @support and @moderators.
The owner of a contributors-enabled account assigns usage permissions to any other Twitter user. Afterwards, a new menu entry “Switch accounts” appears on the menu bar profile dropdown for the user who received contributor permissions. Clicking it logs the contributor into the shared account, where he may send and read tweets, direct messages, follow and unfollow people as well as approve new follower requests (for protected accounts). Access to the account settings is denied, though.
Tweets posted by contributors firstly look like being sent from the account itself. Upon opening the tweet detail view, the contributor’s personal Twitter username is displayed (example: https://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/210462857140252672).
Contributor support is also baked into the Twitter API. For instance, you may find out which users have permission to contribute to an account by invoking the API method users/contributors.
The current implementation of the contributors feature falls short in some regards. These include:
- Private feature
- No API access for contributing users
- No real permissions management
These shortcomings could possibly be addressed like shown next.
The contributors feature is currently restricted to Twitter employees only. Companies and other brands cannot get into using this feature and must therefore resort to third-party offers, where most of them are paid and/or incomplete, as outlined above. The right way to act would be to make the Contributors feature public.
Supporters working on a contributor-enabled account are currently limited to using Twitter’s website. Trying to grant a third-party application OAuth tokens fails with an error message on the OAuth screen. In order to make this feature distinct from any third-party tools, OAuth access provides an easy way to contribute to an account using your favorite app, such as Twitter for Mac.
Obviously, the account admin must be able to revoke any granted OAuth access tokens. Additionally, the user should be able to revoke their OAuth tokens for contributed accounts.
The account admin will perhaps not trust every user the same level of permissions. For example, most supporters may only receive permission to read and reply to tweets and direct messages, while others may also be allowed to approve follower requests and/or to edit the account profile.
This is why a fine-grained permissions editor needs to be provided for the account admin. The ideal location for this editor would be on the same page as where he grants and revokes users access to the account in general. Access to the permissions editor may also be added as permission, so the general account admin may be able to allow contributors to add more contributors.
Inspired by the CoTags, the account admin may define a text that
is prepended and/or appended to any tweets and messages sent by a certain contributor.
This would be the ideal place for personal signatures, being more visible than the
contributors name in the tweet metadata, hidden by default. For example, if
@gpena grants contributor access for
@twitter_es to the user
@monica, any tweets that Monica sends while contributing
to @twitter_es might be appended by ^MQ.
Questions? Get in touch with @myx.