Twitters much anticipated revamp comes in to effect in the UK this Spring and about time too!

Creating your twitter page and keeping track of all the important stats for your brand can involve a lot of tinkering and tweaking to get it just right. My biggest headache for example is finding a one-size-fits-all background to suit everyone's different screen resolution. A very tricky process indeed!

So how will the new changes coming to Twitter improve branding and iron out some of those little fiddly bits? Lets take a look!

Business Brand Pages

Probably the biggest change happening to Twitter. Brand pages are being rolled out for 21 well known brands including the likes of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, PepsiCo & Nike; all of which are highly recognised as fundamental players in utilizing social networking as key marketing tactics.

There are four major changes in particular which will play a significant roll in giving brands a more distinctive presence on Twitter. These are the introduction of a new banner which is placed below a brand's profile information allowing for increased real estate to portray a brand logo, special offers, promos or competitions, a great traffic driver to your website should they wish to find out more.

The new ability to pin a tweet to the top of a brand's tweet stream is a particularly effective addition. The tweet will auto expand allowing you to showcase pictures or videos which are embedded into the tweet which will help gain a whole lot more coverage for more predominant content you want followers to see such as a new release of an advert or a new product launch.

This leads me on to the embedded tweets themselves, They are brilliant! People can now embed tweets onto blog posts and websites creating automatic links direct to your twitter page whenever someone embeds your tweet, a real traffic driver for people with a large influence.

Lastly, Brand pages will be given an exceptionally useful tool whereby @ replies and mentions will be separated, allowing you differentiate from people that have directed a question straight to your brand which needs to be addressed to people mentioning your brand name in their tweets.

Homepage Redesign

At present, keeping track of a twitter page with a large number of followers or a large following base can be extremely difficult to sift through. The homepage layout will be updated to a far simpler design, allowing stats, trends and suggested users to follow to be viewed easier and quicker.

The new design coming to Twitter will see the addition to more dynamic content to your page from the users you currently follow. Tweets now expand to show more information including photos or videos which are embedded into tweets which should clear up the issue of users on your profile being redirected to other web pages when viewing photos or videos.

@ Replies – Twitter's response to Google Ripple

The new @ Connect tab will give you your basic ability to view @replies but with the added bonus of being able to see the interactions from an individual tweet. Think of Google+ and its ripples, its quite similar.

You can track the interaction caused by your individual tweets and see what type of content gets shared the most and analyse and improve as you go on, a very handy tool for tracking down those key influencers in your industry and also a fantastic way to monitor anything viral you might want to release to the masses.

The new # Discover Tab

This new feature enables you to find other people who are talking about the same things you are interested in. In other words, you can filter your feed according to your specific interests. The more you use it the better it gets. Your discover tab becomes more personal over time as it picks up your frequent trends and topics of interest.

Profile Pages

To be honest, not much has changed here! The page has been given a fresh look which seems more streamlined. It caters more towards your interests more than anything by putting them on the forefront of the page. It still has all the same attributes as previous (Followers, following, tweets, favorites, lists, user suggestions, recent images) but organised in a more digestible view.

To sum up!

It looks like Twitter is finally catching up with their social media competitors, and in my opinion, the changes were definitely needed to stay in the race. I still think it has more catching up to do, and that Google+ could be a real threat to the platform, but these steps are certainly a step in the right direction!

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