Ideas don't always fit into 140 characters – and neither does compelling content that can demonstrate to consumers that a brand is a thought leader. Still, Twitter is an increasingly important channel for brands to use to engage prospective clients, and marketers may like the new updates to the microblogging site announced yesterday.
The Twitter blog explains that the new, improved Twitter will offer a richer user experience by providing more context for tweets and embedded media. When consumers click a tweet, a new details panel appears. This offers a brief profile of the individual or brand behind a tweet as well as "related content."
The related content will vary according to users' Twitter activity. It may show replies to a specific tweet, the user's recent tweets, a map displaying the user's location for geotagged tweets or other contextual information, depending on the content of a tweet.
The new Twitter improves consumers' ability to understand tweets – and this is good for marketers who want to make their brands go-to sources of industry information. Now, users won't have to navigate away from Twitter in order to see the pictures, videos or tweet-related conversation threads posted by companies. The detail panel also makes it easier for consumers to discover brands that participate in industry-related conversations without leaving their own homepages.
Twitter's CEO, Evan Williams, spoke at a press gathering at the Twitter headquarters yesterday where he emphasized that the updates aim to help users find valuable information – and this means marketers may more easily attract valuable followers. The updates address that "a greater need than the need to create content is to discover relevant content in a sea of information. It has [previously] been hard to find out what's relevant for you on Twitter," Search Engine Land quotes him as saying.
Marketers may like their odds of finding new clients on the site as it is consistently rising in popularity among consumers. ComScore's latest ranking of top web properties reveals that Twitter.com made it into the top 50 U.S. properties, garnering nearly 25 million unique visitors in the month of July.
