New, Enhanced Profiles A Boon To Brands On Twitter

The most important part of the Twitter redesign for marketers is the new, enhanced profile functionality. It gives them a “much richer canvas,” as Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said earlier today. The new brand profile pages are available to a limited number of companies now but will be rolling out more broadly in the coming weeks.

In addition to the customizable background, the top of the page now allows more brand identity content. Here for example is American Express’ page on the new Twitter. A better example perhaps is Disney’s Pixar.

Below the top banner marketers have the option to include what’s called a “pin tweet.” This is a module that they control and rides above the tweet stream. So when a consumer-user hits the page they’ll see whatever promotional message (including video) the brand has chosen. It can also be a regular tweet.

Here again is the Amex page. In this case there’s a video promoting shopping at small business locations.

Pixar offers a trailer for the forthcoming movie “Brave.”

Regular tweets then appear and flow below the “pin tweet.” (I like “anchor tweet” better.)

Below compare Amex’s Facebook page, which also has lots of branding elements. However with the new Twitter pages there’s a bit more branding than on Facebook — or perhaps more precisely the Twitter brand doesn’t hover over the page as Facebook’s does.

Arguably brands “own” their Twitter profiles more than they do Facebook Pages. Clearly Twitter is going after Facebook (and Google+) with the new profiles and the redesign  more generally. However no brand or marketer is going to abandon Facebook for Twitter. It will be “and” rather than “or.” Twitter now becomes a better branding and promotional vehicle than it was before.

It’s not clear yet whether and how Google+ pages will be affected by this.

Finally, tweets can now be embedded in other sites and blogs, as you would embed a video. They will also allow users to interact with them on the third party site’s page as well (direct message, @mention, RT). There will be a great deal more to say about how this can be used for marketing purposes as people start to implement the feature.

For related coverage from around the web, see here on Techmeme.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.