Should You Care About the New Twitter Update?

It looks that way with Twitter’s plan to rollout an enhanced user interface over the next few weeks. Personally, I don’t understand why anybody would be excited about features that have been integral to Facebook for years.

Here’s the Deal

In the past, twitterers had to link to a third-party site to share videos, photos and other rich media. Twitter now embeds media directly into a slide-out panel that emerges from the right sidebar. This is a definite improvement, but it’s a far cry from innovation.

What Businesses Need To Know

The most immediate impact to Twitter traffic will be better user retention, making it possible for Twitter to serve more ad impressions. Also, the slide-out panel will give users a quick snapshot at the tweeter’s profile, including the people they follow, increasing the volume of connections.

But, when it comes to marketing with the platform, it’s business as usual. It’s still necessary to use third-party sites to upload media and cross fingers when casting your tweets into the noisy Twitter stream. Not to mention, for a service that had serious uptime issues when serving basic text, I’m curious to see how Twitter will perform pulling rich web content into the mix.

If I had to find something useful to the marketer in this update, it might be that instead of your media links sending your followers all over kingdom come, now they just might stay put on your Twitter stream for an extra tweet or two.