Twitter has rolled out a new and striking profile design among select users and will include regular profiles in coming weeks – will this make it easier to reach your customers, as Twitter claims?
Twitter announced in a blog post on April 8 it planned to introduce a new and richer profile design. It is currently available only to a select group, among them a few regular users and some celebrities like the US First Lady (@flotus) and rock band, Weezer (@weezer). The new design – that strongly resembles a certain other social network – includes a few features which will definitely affect the way in which users interact with businesses.
A New Look
Twitter designer David Bellona details the changes in his blog post on Twitter.com. The first change that users are likely to notice is the huge header image (bigger than Facebook’s). Here is what Michelle Obama has done with hers:
Twitter has also changed the way in which users can view and interact with content, through the following three additions.
Best Tweets: Tweets will now vary in size according to their level of engagement, with the most engaged-with occupying the most space. As a result, people who view your page will be drawn to the content which attracts the most interest. For The Today Show, this is already proving the popularity of snappy text and distinctive pictures:
Twitter says that this will drive users to your “best” content, but remember that a particularly unpopular tweet with lots of angry responses has high ‘engagement’ too. This means that users could be drawn to unpopular as well as popular content.
Pinned Tweets: The new layout will allow users to ‘pin’ a tweet so that it will always appear at the top of your page. This seems like a great way to tell potential customers about your business, and maybe to show them how interesting your tweets are. Channing Tatum uses the pin function so that everyone will see his coolest tweet when they visit his profile:
Filtered Tweets: This feature allows users to choose what sort of tweet they see when they visit someone’s stream, from either “Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies.”
What will this mean for marketing?
Starting with the most obvious change, the new header is big, meaning that there is lots of room for branding and pictures, a great opportunity to make your page look great and tell users about your brand. The Today Show have handled this well:—
Taking up the entire width of the browser window, the header offers a lot of freedom, and Today has utilized all the space, filling it with the friendly images of its well-known presenters.
Because tweets with lots of engagement will now attract still more engagement because of their size, it will be even more vital that you compose gripping posts. Otherwise, you risk a twitter feed with a string of micro-tweets that no one will want to click.
The corollary is that if a tweet gets a lot of bad responses, its size make the situation even worse by drawing peoples’ attention to it. As such, if a tweet goes bad the best course of action may be to delete it and move on.
In common with the current Facebook layout, Twitter will how have a picture and video tab in prime position on your homepage. This is yet another reason to post great pictures, otherwise your feed will look sparse – and good tweets, too, which will now be included alongside the media.
What To Do In The Mean Time
Even though most businesses will not have got access to these features yet, it still makes sense to plan and even put together some new material. Why not create a great header image, ready for when the changes first take effect on your profile? People cannot miss the difference, so it makes sense to give them something to enjoy.
Now that people will be more likely to look through the photos and video tab, it might also be worth getting started on creating content for tweets to fill that stream so it doesn’t look bare. The new profile picture will be sized 400 by 400 pixels, and the header 1,500 by 500 – both of these, of course, need to be high quality and in the right format.
The location of your bio will soon be different, also. People are likely to read it in a different way when it is underneath your mugshot on a plain background, rather than overlaying your header as with the old design. Also, when people look at a user’s followers they will see a mosaic of mini-profiles, so it makes sense to optimize your profile so that your mini-profile will be the sort of content that says ‘follow’.
Some purists might say that Twitter is just turning into Facebook, but marketers will just get on with the job of adapting to change within the medium. It is too early to make strong predictions on what the changes will mean, but it is guaranteed that they will re-enforce the growing need for engaging text and great-looking images and video in all social media, especially Twitter.
What you think of the changes and how you plan to utilize them?