Twitter’s quest to grow and outdo itself continues with a focus on visually-alluring layouts and media as well as brand new advertising opportunities.
Twitter’s New Look
In addition to recent changes that include autoplay videos and Twitter Moments, Twitter has made another move towards focusing on media. Most images that will be tweeted on the network will not be cropped (as opposed to all images in the past) and now only images over certain dimensions will appear as square photos (to be achieved by minimal cropping for the images to fit in the aforementioned format). To add, when multiple images are shared at once, they will now be presented in a significantly larger format and the images will not be given the same weight in the layout. Now it will be possible to use one image as the lead or highlighted photo which will appear larger to stand out from the rest.
These changes are an attempt to transition Twitter from a text-based format into a more visually rich social network. This could help attract more users to Twitter and help current users become more loyal to the platform in the short and long-term future. The importance of rich media is apparent across all of the major social media networks, from Instagram to Snapchat. While some may argue that the new media-focused layout may be a negative change to users devoted to Twitter for quick, text-based information to be accessed in their feeds, research points to the move being a strong one for the platform. In fact, images are already standout performers on Twitter. According to findings by HubSpot and SocialBro, tweets with images are 34% more likely to be retweeted. The changes are already available to some users and are expected to roll out for everyone in the near future. To date, this update only appears when Twitter is accessed from Twitter.com.
Twitter Introduces New Advertising Opportunities
Twitter is currently testing promoted tweets to appear for logged out users – approximately 500 million people who read tweets without signing up for Twitter or logging into their Twitter accounts. This group represents a huge, untapped market for brands and Twitter plans to focus on advertising campaigns with the goal of attaining website clicks, conversions and video views for participating businesses. This new marketing opportunity will be offered for desktop tweets to begin with, specifically Twitter profile pages and tweets that are featured on their own pages (Tweet detail pages). Marketers in Australia, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. are eligible to take advantage and not long after, marketers from around the world will be able to join in as well.
