Twitter’s expanding its suite of offerings for businesses with a new feature called Location Spotlight for professional accounts, the company announced on Tuesday. Now, local stores can display details on their profiles such as the location of their business or shop, contact info, and operational hours.
The new feature is available for Twitter Professional account users in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia.
Users can see the new info when they visit a business’ profile. When they tap on the location, they can get directions to the shop through a mapping app like Google Maps.
Notably, app researcher Jane Manchun Wong tweeted last week that Twitter might add a disclaimer under Location Spotlight settings about sharing location data with Google. (We’ve reached out to Twitter for a comment on their data sharing policies for this new feature.)
Businesses can also add a way to contact them in the profile including a phone number, a link to send a text, or an email.
This new feature is similar to business info cards on Google Maps, which display information about the business including its location, website, operating hours, and contact info.
Information about a local business on Google Maps
The social network first introduced Professional profiles last year, which allow businesses and creators to use modules such as the About module to display info, the Shop module to display products from their catalog, and the Newsletter module to create newsletters using the Twitter-owned tool Revue. In March, it made the Professional profiles feature available for everyone.
Despite the acquisition drama, Twitter in the last few months also launched multiple shopping-related features including virtual storefronts to display items for sale and product drops to list products on a particular time and date.
