What?
So we know that Facebook allows us to easily add images to galleries and share them to our friends, but Twitter has always stayed true to it’s minimalist structure and purely been a way of telling people what we are doing via short text based updates or ‘tweets’.
You could argue third party applications such as TwitPic and YFrog allowed us to add images to our profiles but it was never really as simple as uploading directly from your Twitter account and the images never appeared as saved galleries on your profile.
How?
Twitter has now added a new image gallery feature which loads a strip of thumbnails of your recently uploaded pictures into the sidebar. When you view a person’s homepage directly, you get a larger image. When you view a profile by clicking on a person in your stream, you get a smaller set. Both allow you to click and enlarge the photos in a very similar way to Facebook!
Why?
So why have Twitter added this feature?
Adding new features like this keeps people on the site longer and adds interest to the general text based tweets. It also means people won’t miss images that are uploaded by people they follow as they would usually be buried under a stream of updates as they are a constant feature on a profile.
So?
More interestingly for us at Cloud 9 it allows us to market ourselves and our clients in a better way on Twitter that we could only before do using Facebook. We can brand ourselves in a better fashion and ‘tweet’ with images rather than text and images. As well as text, tweets can ‘retweeted’ to allow them maximum interest. It may seem like double the work but we look at it being double the exposure to a normally out of reach audience.
We’re excited about this new feature and will be sure to be using it! Keep an eye on what we’re doing on https://twitter.com/c9dd or https://www.facebook.com/cloud9digitaldesign