In the past few months, Twitter has introduced a range of new Twitter cards to enhance its in-stream experience.

As images have taken center stage on social networks, Twitter has rolled out app cards, product cards and gallery cards to its users.

This week, Twitter took things one step further with the introduction of Lead Generation Cards.

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Currently only available to a small, hand-picked group of users, Twitter’s new Business Center will provide a range of powerful tools to businesses and brands on the network, including:

• Customisation of your business profile page
• Adding a “verified account” badge to your profile
• Extra preferences, including being able to receive direct messages from customers that you are not following
• Account management tools that will allow multiple employees to easily tweet from one profile (and be credited accordingly)

The part in bold is pretty huge. This allows companies to appease customers by allowing two-way, private communication, whilst also maintaining a clean Twitter feed, something that hasn’t been possible before. Prior to this toolkit, brands were forced to either follow everybody back, and suffer the consequences, or they (rightly) put their focus on signal-over-noise, and risked crapping all over any future sales.

Once Business Center goes live, expect a ton of mass-unfollowing from corporate accounts.

It’s unclear how this verification process works, but one imagines (and hopes) that it won’t be as simple as ticking a box.

As said, this toolkit is slowly rolling out, and is highly unlikely to appear on everybody’s screen, with the focus very much on additional functionality for brands, not individuals.

Still, if you’re a business user on Twitter – and, perhaps more importantly, Twitter is aware of this – keep an eye on your inbox for updates.

(See more at Mashable.)