Twitter's Redesign & What It Means For Your Business

Gitika Bhatla | @gitika_bhatla Twitter has been consistently working on improving its Smartphone and web experience in order to keep up with its competition. Its newest update is a complete makeover that takes the social media platform from mostly text-based to highly visual. This latest update looks very similar to Twitter's No.1 competitor, Facebook.  As usual, new changes means that brands and companies will have to adapt their social media marketing style on Twitter. Basically, this new makeover pushes brands to get more visual on Twitter.

Profile Changes

One of the main changes is the updated profile look. Currently available to a select group of users including First Lady Michelle Obama, the update will be rolled out to the rest of  the existing users in the coming weeks.  To make it more visually appealing, the new web profile lets users select a larger profile photo and customize the background/wallpaper. When adding your new background/wallpaper photo, the image should measure 1500 x 500. The top 398 px should contain your company's logo or text because the bottom gets partially cut off. Your new profile picture should measure 256 x 256. 

Tweets and Feeds

As for tweets, a lot of new features have been introduced to make them more visual, interactive and fun to use. Twitter is introducing three new types of tweets with this new update.

1. The"Best Tweets" in terms of engagement i.e. retweets, favorites, and comments will appear slightly larger. This means that your brand's most successful tweets will be much more prominent in your followers' feeds. To use this to your company's advantage, post tweets that encourage followers to favorite and retweet them.

2. Now users can also 'pin' tweets to the top of their feed (similar to a Facebook post) to help followers know what they are all about. For companies, "Pinned Tweets" means coming up with a 140 character tweet to represent your business when people come to your Twitter page. This will also promote and drive traffic to your website.

3. Finally, when users go to their homepage they can now use "Filtered Tweets" to choose which timeline to view when checking out other profiles (like tweets minus pictures or videos, or tweets and replies).