Casual Fridays BLOG

3 Reasons The New Twitter Is Great For Social Media Marketing

Twitter recently announced a slew of changes, all with the goal of making it easier for users to follow what they care about and discover what's happening now. The biggest change was the redesign of their entire interface that will be taking place gradually over the coming weeks. The other big announcement, which has significant impact for businesses, is enhanced profile pages for businesses and brands. Yes, businesses have always been able to use Twitter, but now Twitter is giving them the ability to go above and beyond the functionality given to basic Twitter users.
Businesses will now have a large header image, the ability to display a tagline and other visuals, and even the ability to control the message visitors see when visiting the profile page. You can even make the message a photo or video and it will appear expanded. This means marketers can display an awesome intro message for new visitors to their business Twitter page.

The enhanced profiles are exclusive for 21 launch partners of Twitter - brands like @AmericanExpress, @BestBuy, and @CocaCola to name a few.

The changes Twitter made are awesome because it makes for a friendlier experience for not only the users that wish to engage with the brand, but it's ideal for businesses wishing to use Twitter as part of their digital marketing efforts. Now you can build a rich profile page with a lot of marketing potential.

Here are the three reasons we think the changes are absolutely awesome for businesses and social media marketing:

1. Header Image - The header image essentially becomes a leaderboard ad for your business page. This presents a great opportunity to market something new every couple of weeks so you are always presenting your followers and new visitors with something fresh and different - it makes the page less boring. For example, @BestBuy is promoting their extended price match guarantee during the holidays right now.
   
   
2. Promoted Message - This too becomes an additional online ad space for your business. Yes, a business can put a simple text update in this space, but businesses that take true advantage of this feature will promote cool videos or photos. Sticking with the @BestBuy example, you can see they are showcasing their current commercial that is hosted on YouTube.
   
   
3. More Creativity - Creative and well designed Twitter pages for businesses used to mean you had a professional Twitter background. The problem is, over time as Twitter made some slight modifications to their design and layout, designing the background image was always a mystery because you never knew what size monitor your visitors would have when they viewed your page, so you really never could design the perfect Twitter background for all. With the new layout and enhanced features, now businesses don't have to worry about including company messages or info on the background because there is room to put that information in the new features of the enhanced profiles. Instead, businesses/brands can be a little more creative in their backgrounds. For example, @BestBuy has a nice season theme with some gift boxes which is appropriate since it's the holiday season right now.  The best part, this background doesn't matter what size monitor someone views it on.

We are excited about the changes Twitter has made because as an agency it will definitely give us the freedom to do some really creative and awesome things for our clients. What about you? Do you like the new changes Twitter has made?