Are Twitter jumping on the Facebook bandwagon?
From Tuesday the 8th of April, Twitter HQ started rolling out a major new layout design for user’s profiles. Although it may not be available at this moment for everyone, don’t worry it’ll soon be coming to you! Our RAD SEO profile has already had the new design for over a month and I’ve just had my Twitter profile updated earlier this week so it certainly appears to be rolling out in stages without any real priority on who it picks first although all new accounts appear to be switching to the new design from the off.
So what’s new in the Twitter profile redesign?
The new profile consists of a larger customised header picture that fits to the screen and a profile picture with your description on the left (just like Facebook). Instead of the old timeline you can now choose which tweets you would like to be ‘Pinned’ to the top, a very handy tool if you want to promote something for a limited period of time. If you do not make a selection Twitter will automatically choose your most popular tweets and pin them for you. The layout includes a ‘Tweets and replies’ tab so you can easily see your history of tweets and who you have replied to. Along the left side where the profile picture is, it now includes followers that you know (much like Facebook’s ‘Mutual friends’) of that person and their photos and video.
On the right of the design you will see a handy list of who to follow, this will update based on your tweets and existing followers, you can refresh this or also view popular accounts. Under this you get a view of all the current trends, very handy if you want to jump on the bandwagon getting involved in the latest viral tweets.
Although the new design looks much more appealing to the eye, the only real difference between Twitter and Facebook profile pages now seems to be the placement Twitter uses of the images and followers. To be honest I quite like it and it freshens up the look and feel, just and a shame that they didn’t come up with something a little more original.
Only time will tell to see how the new layout will change users minds about using the networking site. For those who are not fans of Facebook, this could sway their opinion of Twitter if the new layout is to adopt a strategy that includes increased Twitter advertising amongst the plethora of tweets, after all do we really want another networking site to be crammed full of advertisement like the route Facebook is heading down?. (We certainly hope not!)
