Slowly but surely Twitter’s drive towards generating significant revenues is happening as news breaks that it has taken another step with the hiring of two sales directors including Dan Coughlin, the former Facebook director of media sales.

Coughlin is joined by Amanda Levy, a five year veteran of Yelp, who most recently headed up its West Coast sales operation. She will take on a similar role at Twitter looking after the west whilst Coughlin handles the east.

Twitter Dick Costolo COO said the hirings were a signal that Twitter was opening up its Promoted Suite programme, which includes promoted tweets and promoted trends, to the wider market having trialled it with a number of advertisers.

Promoted tweets has attracted advertisers including Disney Pixar for ‘Toy Story 3′ and Virgin America while Promoted trends has seen the likes of Coke, Disney, Sony and Twentieth Century Fox as high profile early adopters.

Porter Gale, Virgin’s vice president, marketing, said in June that using Twitter’s promoted tweets programme helped its offer to launch its expansion to Toronto sell out in three hours — “without the support of traditional advertising”.

With Coughlin and Levy on-board Twitter will be looking to have a strong fourth quarter as its sales operation moves up several gears.

The Promoted Suite revenue stream is one of several commercial offerings Twitter has been developing in recent months. Another is its @earlybird account, debuted last month and which carries special offers for brands paying to feature on the channel. So far the likes of Disney and JetBlue have trialled this.

Another potential revenue stream is the promoted user unit, according to a report last month on All Things Digital. This was described as a way for large accounts to attract more followers. The site quoted sources saying that this service would be similar to a “Promoted Tweeter” ad that “highlights specific user accounts, designed to bump up follower counts”.

We have already had an inkling of how this might work with Twitter’s latest hit and miss feature “Who to follow”, which it was argued earlier this week on the Wall “goes against the principles of social media that have made Twitter so successful”.