By Mike Tomlinson
For all the supposed earth-rattling changes that Twitter built up in anticipation of its new layout, its quiet rollout over the past week left a lot of us at EPR hanging - do I even have the new twitter redesign? Is this really it? Thankfully, at least Christmas came early for me and I wasn’t the last in the office to roll over to the new design. Checking my account hour after hour, I was soon granted access to what I imagined would be a triumphant, gold plated Twitterdom of a new age; a revolutionary upheaval in how the tweeting masses, well.. tweeted!
Alas, what I realized was that despite a few noteworthy changes, businesses wouldn’t be changing their twitter strategy much, if at all. It wasn’t the gilded paradise I had been hoping for, but there were still a few changes worthy of a second glance.
One highlight of the new design that will help businesses are the ‘Connect’ and ‘Discover’ tabs on the user home page, making it easier for users to monitor exactly who is interacting with them as well as enabling a better ‘news feed’-like visual representation of what is trending between the website’s members. The obvious win for businesses is that keeping track of power re-tweeters and responders. This will help companies stay on-point or adjust their message depending on the trends developing from their account output. Expandable tweets—not something new—have been tweaked to allow users to expand tweets within the stream, saving users the hassle of being redirected to a sidebar or another page to read the full tweet or see its media contents.
Another neat new tool is the ability to embed tweets on a third party website; no longer must you capture a screenshot and upload it as a picture! Instead users are now able to feature, for example, a tweet by an industry analyst on their company’s press room page simply by copying the provided code on the bottom right of any tweet (‘Embed This’). This should lend more credibility to third-party tweets, giving others who want to promote things being said about them a clean, easy way to repost these comments on their own websites or online press rooms.
But, that was pretty much it (cue the sad face). Ultimately, anything that streamlines the steps required to get select information, is a good thing, especially for businesses. Yet for most of us, our personal day-to-day usage of twitter likely will not change. The informal nature of twitter posts make it unlikely a company’s tweet—controversies aside— will wind up in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. But the new layout means that staying in touch with key influencers is easier and more manageable, and that’s certainly something worth tweeting about.

