3 Major Twitter Changes - comming up soon..

1. News - confirmed: Twitter is just a few miles away from its new-look change. Appearantly the real-time micro-blogging platform is about to undergo a major redesign:



Details of the redesign have been disclosed as soon as Doug Bowman, Twitter's creative director, posted a picture showing a new-look which clearly indicates that a key element will be the use of more statistics.

"Terrific start" - was the overall online reaction to the new Twitter look posted on Dribble, showing a predominantly positive sentiment. Anyway that's not just it..
Twitter has proved its efficiency as a mainstream broadcast channel when it comes to massive word spread - a few cases a worth mentioning: Chinese and Chilean earthquake (signups spiked 1200%), Shashi Tharoor political moves in India (signups have increased nearly 100%, whereas Indian audience witnessed 550 million mobile phone users sending and receiving tweets via SMS in 2010 already) etc.

Today Twitter population expanded largely across the world, where 60% of registered Twitter accounts come from outside the US, making it incredibly culturally & geographically diverse. That means an entirely new play ground for advertisers and social searches. Here it comes the 2nd change:

2. Twitter launches a new advertising programme:

The new ad programme, Promoted Tweets, is based on a similar approach to Google, with marketers purchasing keywords, and their posts appearing at the top of a list when users enter relevant search terms.

If you're wondering what may've served as purspose to this initiative, then the answer is in the nature of online comments - Promoted Tweets will be basically putting forward the content added by source-companies about their products/services, making the "official" information come first (as in a press-release when you first learn the initial source' view).

Chris Bruzzo, vice president of Starbucks' brand and online content on Promoted Tweets: "When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that."

Clearly, what brands are anticipating with the new ad offer is its: alarm & reach options, but also challenges, such as moderation of negative word-of-mouth, which would come much easier under a single umbrella (in this case - being triggered by the company-owned content). The initial charging model will be cost-per-thousand, planning to expand as soon as the programme catches on. And here it comes the 3rd new feature:

3. Twitter's new integration solution - @Anywhere, promises to tick the following boxes: traffic, engagement and insight. How? By embedding a Tweet box into your sites and enabling further sharing options:




Although we've already witnessed similar ideas with Facebook Connect and FriendFeed, Twitter's new @Anywhere platform hopes that publishers will find the integration options easier and choose to use the tools to keep site visitors more engaged: auto-linkification of usernames, hovercards (similar to ones we see on Twitter.com), follow buttons, tweet boxes and user login/signup options .

Publishers are welcome to start using the new feature - as of today: http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere

Finally, couldn't overlook this cute poster uploaded by Ev Williams - Twitter Co-founder on current Twitter stats - definetely some food for thought...- let's digest together:



Hope you've found this useful. Looking forward to hearing your new comments/suggestions on our next Menu choice.

Cooking for you, Digital Lunch Team
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