Twitter Expands Access to Professional Profiles and Ticketed Spaces

Twitter’s looking to keep its foot on the development accelerator, with the expansion of two new projects that will provide more opportunities for brands and creators in the app.

First off, Twitter is now inviting more businesses to apply for its Professional Profiles test, which enables brands to showcase more business information in a dedicated, additional profile space in the app.

As you can see in this example, Twitter’s Professional Profiles add several new display elements to your Twitter presence, including a business location listing (which people can tap on to open in Google Maps), hours of operation and contact info, all in a new module beneath your main profile display.

Twitter launched its initial test of Professional Profiles back in April, and now, more businesses are getting notifications like these in their inbox.

That could suggest that the option is getting closer to a full roll out, and with Twitter also experimenting with new icons for businesses, delineating their sector, it seems that the next move for the option is imminent.

In addition to this, Twitter’s also expanding access to Ticketed Spaces, which it first opened up for public applications back in June.

So it’s not available to everyone as yet, but from today, more people will have the capacity to host their own paid-for Space, from which they can generate direct revenue for their efforts.

I mean, they’ll get a bit. Twitter is only taking 3% of the charges for Ticketed Spaces (up to $50k in total earnings), but app store fees also need to be factored in, which will reduce the creator’s overall share. For example, on iOS, if you set a ticket price for your Space of $5, $2.80 from each ticket sold would go to you, while 70c would go to Twitter, and $1.50 would go to Apple/Google.

So that’s another element to keep in mind – but even so, it does provide another revenue opportunity, and it could prompt more people to utilize Spaces, which seems to have lost some of its initial momentum, as the air comes out of the audio social trend.

At the same time, it’s also a little unclear, right now, what Twitter will be doing to further promote Spaces discovery.

For the last few months, Twitter has been developing a new, dedicated Spaces tab in the app, which would provide users with an easy way to access in-progress broadcasts at any time. But last week, with the arrival of Communities, it added a different tab in that bottom bar slot.

So will it be Spaces or Communities that gets the final nod? I don’t know, and maybe Twitter doesn’t know either, because three days after the launch of Communities, it previewed another new design for the Spaces tab.

Maybe that’s a consequence of increased development speed, or maybe it’s all part of a broader plan that Twitter will reveal over time.

Either way, Spaces needs good content to keep people coming back, especially if they’re going to have trouble finding it. As such, it’s important that Twitter moves to expand ticketed Spaces, which will also provide more revenue potential for more creators in the app.

Oh, and there’s also this:

I have no idea what this is.