Today on the Twitter blog, Animitra Banerji from their product team wrote about the ‘contributors’ feature, which allows organizations to signify which individual from their team is tweeting. Already enabled by third-party applications such as CoTweet, the difference with Twitter’s “By” functionality is that it is native to Twitter, as shown in the screenshot below.

A tweet from Twitter's account, from @Biz

For your school’s Twitter presence, this has major implications, as one of the main complaints from higher ed about Twitter is that Twitter generally makes it difficult to put a name or identity with a tweet. This allows each member of your team to identify themselves to your audience. Another, less substantial benefit of the “by” function is that it frees up a few more characters in the tweet.

As far as if this feature will come as a part of Twitter’s paid commercial account, has not been announced yet. We could speculate that it will be, as Twitter has not rolled out a cost structure to date. It’s important to keep in mind that this feature is still in testing, and lots of time may pass until it’s made available for commercial accounts to use. It would be neat if they offered an educational discount like Apple, but that’s probably just the optimist in me.

For the more details on today’s announcement, you can read the original post here. For CoTweet’s awesome reaction to this announcement, read a post from CoTweet CEO Jesse Engle, here.

*Full disclosure, we share investors with CoTweet through The Founders Fund.