Twitter have put the first of their dedicated business-user features – rumoured since last year and following the launch of paid ads last month – into beta testing. A few lucky souls have been invited to trial the Business centre; one of them has decided to share some screenshots with mashable.com.

The features that will be available to Twitter Business Centre users are intended to improve Twitter’s usability as a customer relations and PR platform; Business Centre users will be able to receive direct messages from Twitterers they don’t follow, and will also be able to add multiple users to one account.

These tweaks should make Business Centre Twitter profiles more flexible tools for dealing with customer enquiries, and increase the reaction-speed of damage-limitation public relations. Twitter is increasingly a tool for consumer campaigning; these Business Centre features indicate that Twitter fully understands the needs of their commercial users, and what they use their social media profiles for; speedy communication and flexible reaction.

There is, however, no word as yet on the access to “stats” that, according to statements made by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone last year, will eventually be made available to business users. Being a measurement-focussed agency, we’re more than a little bit interested in what these stats will include, especially seeing as Biz Stone has expressed the desire to provide users with “some of the analytics” related to their Twitter accounts.