New Twitter Updates

June 30, 2014 By Kalah,

Brazil wasn’t the only team that emerged victorious this weekend during the thrilling Brazil vs. Chile World Cup match. Team Twitter walked away with a few “personal best” trophies of their own during the shootout, including a record breaking 389,000 tweets per minute. With well over 600 million users, there’s no denying Twitter has earned its place in the social media hall of fame. Not surprisingly, rather than taking time to bask in its glory, the San Francisco powerhouse is already sprinting towards its next hat trick. As the classic idiom goes, all good things come in three - especially World Cup goals - but what about Twitter’s three new features? Twitter is introducing three new components to its platform aimed to enhance the user experience and overall business of the company.

Retweets

“Retweet with Comment” is still in beta testing, but we have high hopes for the potential upgrade. The retweet options Twitter currently employs are a straight “Retweet” of a post or a “Quote Tweet.” While quoting, you only have leftover characters from the original post to communicate your opinions. For example if the tweet you’re quoting uses 135 characters, you have five characters left to express your feelings while keeping it under the 140 character max - thank goodness emojis are impassioned and only take up one character. However, if “Retweet with Comment” is endorsed you’ll have your rightful 140 characters to let your voice be heard, while still quoting the original tweet. That’s right, you’ll be able to make substantial comments with actual words, not just the angry emoji or the heart-eyes emoji - words!

GIFs

Another exciting feature we can’t wait to take advantage of is Twitter’s newfound support of animated GIFs both online and on mobile devices. Graphics Interchange Formats (GIF) are those cute, moving animations often paired with funny jokes or memes. Laughing and GIFs basically go hand in hand, so we fully support both.

Install App Ads

On the business end of things, Twitter is stepping up its advertisement game. From now on many of the targeted ads you’ll be seeing in the Twittersphere are going to be “install app ads.” The idea behind these ads is that it takes you straight from the ad to the purchase and/or download point, significantly reducing clutter. Companies that choose to advertise with Twitter are offered different payment plans including an option to only pay for the click-through conversions their ads attract. This is great for companies because the investment is presented as an almost guarantee on your financial investment. The downside to install app ads fall on the user experience. People are typically annoyed with the advertisements embedded in their newsfeeds, regardless of interest or accessibility to the product. Hopefully Twitter continues to put users first and cap the ads people are exposed to, rather than getting greedy and advertisement crazy (cough, Facebook, cough.) Be sure to follow @TwitterData and us, @DigitalOperativ for the latest Twitter news and updates. And in usual fashion, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line if you ever need social media or marketing help.