Twitter, the online social media utility, recently reached a spike in popularity before experiencing a user exodus due to the rise of mobile devices and third party apps that offer competing services. In response to the market shift, the company introduced a comprehensive redesign earlier this month. Hoping to win back its dispersing audience, Twitter has revised its homepage to improve navigability. Stats, trending topics and suggested users are now easier to find and follow. The @reply utility has also been revamped, and the company has introduced the # Discover tab which allows users to sift quickly through categories of interest.
But the change generating the most buzz has been the introduction of Twitter “branding pages”, which are of special interest to commercial users and online marketers. Until now, tweet backgrounds have been small and difficult to customize. Users have needed to strategically condense information and customization in order to optimize available space. But branding pages are designed to provide more room to users who want to add brand logos and company information to their tweets.
Branding pages are also intended to control the message presented on a company’s profile page. Specific, high quality tweets, or Promoted Tweets, will be auto expanded and moved to the top of a company’s tweet timeline. This will allow companies with branding pages to highlight their best content while still continuing to update a feed with fresh tweets. Promoted Tweets, like all tweets, will be able to provide links to additional photo and video content. So far, 21 launch partner companies have adopted Twitter brand pages, including Dell, Coca-Cola, Verizon Wireless and Paramount Pictures.
With the launch of its branding pages, Twitter hopes to compete with a similar brand page utility introduced by Google + earlier this year.
Image By: KevinUrrutia
