Twitter Revamps are Good News for Marketers
Visual content provides the pretty packaging to the written content we use for marketing. Some argue that it’s more important than the written content. This holds true wherever you are posting your content online, whether on your own website or on social media platforms, such as Twitter A while back, in a post introducing Instagram, we briefly touched on the photo sharing capabilities of varying social media sites. One of my criticisms of Twitter was that, while it makes good use of a hash tag sharing method, it was not too friendly to visual content, often unnecessarily cropping photos. It also did not offer many options for video or for editing photos, as both Facebook and Instagram do. Since then, many of those criticisms have been addressed (not in response to me, I’m sure) through the addition of several new features to the Twitter App.
Most notable and obvious to the casual viewer is that pictures are no longer cropped. Before, any landscapestyle photo was skimmed down slightly on its top and bottom, while portrait photos were chopped into nearly unrecognizable fractions of their true form. Beginning 7th December, this feature has been fixed, showing any photo in their full dimensions.
Another change going handinhand with the expanded photos feature is a new sort of gallery. Before, when multiple photos were uploaded together, they would display in a tiled gallery of severely cropped thumbnails. Due to space constraints, multiplepicture galleries are still cropped in the main feed; however, they are now presented in a more flattering aspect ratio.
In addition to the photo display features, Twitter is beginning to offer photo and video editing features. While this catches them up to similar features that both Facebook and Instagram have offered for some time, these are only available on their mobile app. Unlike on Instagram, which serves almost exclusively as a mobile platform, Twitter is just as functional on a desktop and many users might miss having these new features available on their computers. So why is any of this big news for marketers? As said earlier, visual content maybe be, at times, more important than written content. As Twitter moves from its textbased origins into a much more visualfriendly medium, we are being given many more ways to customize our content and to get it seen in the way we intend.