Sarah Ahmed
December 9, 2011
So, a big redesign of Twitter was unleashed yesterday. It promises to provide a faster, easier, simpler version of Twitter to the people. But what does this mean for your business?
We can see four ways new Twitter will change the relationship between consumers and brand,s that you should be aware of:
1. It’s suddenly a lot easier for consumers to engage even more with your content.
Photos and videos are now embedded in your tweet within the homepage/profile page itself, in line with the rest of the page’s content.
This means that your consumer doesn’t have to divert from their homepage or actively choose to leave the page to see your content and can interact with it directly on the page itself. Below is a screenshot of how your content would appear from new Twitter, using ourselves as an example:
This is excellent news for companies as this is one less step for your customers to see your content – automatically increasing the reach of your photos/videos and the likelihood of engagement.
2. You have a lot more freedom to make your page visually appealing.
Twitter have clearly taken heed from Google+’s brand pages with this one. 21 launch partners -including brands such as Coca-Cola, American Express, McDonald’s and Hewlett-Packard – have been granted the freedom to customize their page. They have been able to tailor their headers and give their bio and tagline more prominence on their page, and even choose a particular ‘featured Tweet’ to display at the top.
It is unclear at the moment if Twitter will open this up to other/all brands in the future, but it certainly gives those companies an excellent platform to display their brand if they can. One to watch.
3. The more accessible interface has instantly widened your current and future consumer-base.
It is widely understood that some people have found Twitter confusing and its @ and # symbols off-putting. It is clear to see that the main rationale behind New Twitter is to get around this.
With the simpler categories of Home, Connect, Discover and Me, beginner users can more visibly understand the process, thus encouraging more people to use Twitter. A wider Twitter user-base is nothing but good news for companies, especially companies who don’t have a naturally “tech savvy” customer base.
4. The new #Discover category means that consumers are more likely to discover you.
With ‘#Discover’, New Twitter promises to generate relevant stories personalised especially for you based on your connections, location and language. For brands, this hopefully means increased visibility in front of your consumers – i.e. allowing them to discover you almost automatically, based on the relevancy of their tweets compared to the tweets your business puts out.
This focus on ‘discoverability’ has been carried through to many of the changes brought into new Twitter e.g. in the Activity section now, it is more obvious to see who your friends are following and what Tweets they retweet or favourite.
This is extremely important for brands as it indicates a shift to the Facebook recommendation system, or possibly the essence of what Stumbleupon is trying to do.
For consumers, they can feed their curiosity by not only seeing that their friends ‘Like’ Starbucks on Twitter, they can also see more clearly which brands their friends are ‘following’, retweeting and engaging with on Twitter.
For brands, this cannot be underestimated in importance as State of Social 2011 reports that 78% of consumers trust social peer recommendations, whereas only 14% trust adverts.
Businesses need to make their tweets even more social and relevant
Companies need to be focusing a lot of their efforts on genuinely engaging with their consumers on social media and the way that the Twitter redesign places renewed Facebook-like emphasis on the activity of your friends can only be good news for businesses. It also adds additional checks when making sure you aren’t making company mistakes on Twitter, which many are.
If you’re a brand looking to understand how to make New Twitter work for you, then 3seven9 offer training that might be right for your company.
Meanwhile, check out the Top 5 Mistakes that your company may be making on Twitter!
