Twitter Professional Profiles Available to More Businesses
Twitter now has an application form for businesses to fill out if they’re interested in upgrading. Businesses will be approved if they meet a basic set of eligibility criteria. Here’s more about Twitter’s professional profiles, including what you can do with them and how to apply for one.
What is a Professional Profile on Twitter?
A professional profile is a free upgrade to standard profiles, which is available as an option to those with professional accounts.
You can use a professional profile to display information you’re not able to showcase on a standard profile. Businesses, publishers, developers, and creators can display the following information on their upgraded profile page:
- Business location: Listed directly in the profile and displayed visually on a small map. People can tap on the location map/listing to open Google Maps and get directions.
- Hours of operation (optional): Showcase the days and times people can reach your business at a physical location.
- Methods of contact: Enable options for customers to contact your business through any or all of the following methods:
- Phone call
- Text message
- Twitter Direct Message
This cluster of information is referred to as the ‘about module.’
In addition, a professional profile opens up access to enhanced features that aren’t available to businesses with a standard profile.
Who is Eligible For a Professional Profile on Twitter?
In order to qualify for a professional profile you must first have a professional Twitter account.
A standard account can be converted into a professional account from the settings screen by selecting “Switch to Professional.”
From there Twitter will guide you through the rest of the steps.
Along with having a professional account, your business must meet the following criteria:
- Have a physical location where you do business with clients or customers.
- Be based in the United States and use Twitter in English.
If that criteria is met you can go on to submit an application form.
Note that any business can submit an application, but Twitter is going to review every application that comes through to make sure the business qualifies.
Apply For a Professional Profile on Twitter
Businesses are asked to submit a brief form to confirm their eligibility for a professional profile.
The form asks for you business’s name, address, contact information, and hours of operation.
After submitting the application, Twitter will get in touch through email to confirm or deny your eligibility.
Sources: business.twitter.com,
Google explains why the title change to the search results
Google has confirmed that it not only made a change to what title it shows in the search results but also disclosed how much of a change it actually was. For the past few weeks, Google said it was using your chosen HTML title tag 80% of the time. Now Google said it is using as-is title tags 87% of the time, a seven-point increase: “Title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before,” Google wrote.
Why the change. “We’ve used text beyond title elements in cases where our systems determine the title element might not describe a page as well as it could. Some pages have empty titles. Some use the same titles on every page regardless of the page’s actual content. Some pages have no title elements at all,” said Google. The company then listed off other reasons why it won’t use your HTML title tag:
- Half-empty titles (” | Site Name”)
- Obsolete titles (“2020 admissions criteria – University of Awesome”)
- Inaccurate titles (“Giant stuffed animals, teddy bears, polar bears – Site Name”)
- Micro-boilerplate titles (“My so-called amazing TV show,” where the same title is used for multiple pages about different seasons)
- and more.
If you noticed changes to your click-through rate from the Google search results, it may be related to these changes. Hopefully, those changes are positive since it is a win-win for Google to provide titles that its searchers want to click on. If not, Google said it will keep making improvements. It’s critical that SEOs continue to provide feedback on the adjustments to the title tag system as well as any changes that play out in real-time.
Mark Zuckerberg apologises for Facebook Down on Monday October 4
CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for, an outage that took services offline for six hours on Monday, 4th October 2021.
All three properties as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down starting around 11:40AM ET Monday and remained inaccessible until they came back online some hours later.
To make matters worse, many of Facebook’s internal tools and communication systems couldn’t be accessed while the network was down. That extended the time it took to resolve the problem.
While Facebook was working to get everything up and running again, it acknowledged there was a problem but didn’t estimate when services would return.
It went where millions of others did during the great Facebook outage of 2021: Twitter.
Fortunately for the businesses and advertisers that depend on Facebook, the outage wasn’t nearly as bad as the one in 2019 that impacted all three services for over 24 hours.
Now that everything is back online and working as it should, people want answers for why the apps they depend on were inaccessible for a significant amount of the work day.
While Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down speculation ran rampant that they were targets of a sophisticated hack or DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.
Is there any truth to those rumors? Let’s look a look at the company’s official announcement.
Why Was Facebook Down on Monday October 4?
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down on Monday due to an interruption in communication between company data centers.
The interruption is said to be caused by configuration changes on the routers that coordinate traffic between the data centers.
Disruption of network traffic had a cascading effect on the way Facebook’s data centers communicate, which brought all services to a halt.
Facebook confirms it’s back online and dispels rumors that any user data was compromised:
“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change. We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”
Zuckerberg posted a brief apology on his Facebook page, stating:
“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
How will advertisers be impacted?
Facebook confirms ads didn’t run while its sites were down, so advertisers will not be charged for campaigns they were running during that time.
Ads have now resumed and may even run on accelerated delivery Facebook’s systems recover from the outage.
What happens now?
The next step for the company is to learn more about what caused the outage, as Facebook says it’s committed to building a network that can resist these kinds of disruptions.
“We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”
In the future, Facebook will keep the public informed about outages on an official status page.
