It’s been a long time coming, but this morning Mashable is reporting that Twitter is set to roll out its long-awaited ‘Business Centre’ – a scheme that will allow businesses to add additional features (possibly at a cost) to help them use Twitter to engage with prospects and customers.

Twitter announced that this was on its way last year, but it has taken a bit longer than expected to finally appear despite some tests last year with companies like Starbucks.

According to Mashable, the main features will be:

• The ability to customise a business profile page
• Add a ‘verified account’ badge
• Additional ‘preferences’
• Add contributors so that multiple people can contribute to the same account (see how Starbucks already uses this here)
• The ability to accept direct messages from any of their followers, regardless of whether they follow that person or not

This is another huge step towards really helping businesses use Twitter more effectively. There is no news as yet as to whether Twitter will begin charging businesses for the server and/or when it will be rolled out beyond the early beta customers.