With Twitter rolling out a redesigned interface, and almost 2.4 million tweets on the topic, the idea for the design imperative justified exactly that – to get people, a.k.a Twitterers, ‘talking’. And as more and more Tweets filled the search arena, more and more people flogged to – even the curious ones – see what the whole fuss was all about.
So why is this ‘talk’ ever so important for twitter?
With so much frequency in Tweets and attraction, Twitter hopes to translate user engagement with the platform into an advertiser magnet. This could just well work, since the new design incorporates more interactive features and multimedia data that directly open up interactivity and engagement to the 160 million users, which Twitter can boast of, to stick around longer on the company’s website.
With the redesign, the executives at the micro-blogging company have started justifying twitter usage with their own versions of how the new design and features help both the company’s service provisions as well as the benefits to the community. As Twitter COO, Dick Costolo, said:
“It’s going to increase the value that people are getting out of Twitter, so in less time you can get more information and value.”
Because the Twitter platform has traditionally been unappealing to users, Twitter hopes to utilize the new real estate created by the new design to enable deeper engagement with the community. And with literally a dollar-to-user ratio in venture capital (has raised $160 million in venture capital), increasing ad dollars are definitely becoming a priority for the once advertising adverse company. Towards that end, Twitter has slowly started to run ads called Promoted Tweets that people see when they search the site.
Boasting new media content partnerships with the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Twitpic, and Ustream, to incorporate rich media directly into the micro-blogging experience, twitter is using the display pane in the new design to serve related tweets, mini profiles, and maps in order to contextualize the existing limited 140 character Tweets, the reason the platform exists in the first place. This fact can also negate the need for third-party applications that have been offering Twitter services to users for some time.
With the added features, and more advertiser and user friendly user interface, Twitter now intends to build around third-party successes, and aims to provide great user experience from within it’s platform, exposing (hopefully) users to more valuable engagement.
