A few days after Instagram advertising got suspiciously good, Twitter followed up with some big changes for image and video.

In case you haven’t been on Twitter in a couple days (for shame… that’s bad Twitter marketing practice!) you may be in for a very visual surprise the next time you log on. In an effort to keep up with all the happenings in the world of visual social media, Twitter has ignored their commitment textual simplicity and begun showing visual links to appear automatically in update feeds.

Now tweets with a link to an image or a Vine automatically display thumbnails right there in the feed. Which, despite some user opinions, we think is pretty fantastic.

What This Means for Your SMM Approach

In short: tweet more visuals!

In the past the links to images and video have been mainly for Facebook, Pinterest, etc. There’s just some bit of magic that gets lost when you reduce a video or image down to a shortened link – plus the lack of thumbnail in a Twitter link makes it pop less, making it less visually stimulating and enticing to a reader.

But now engaging with that image for a twitter follower is as simple as, well, just looking at it, and engaging with a Vine is as simple as tapping the thumbnail.



This motion toward a more visual Twitter stream is a response to the growing demand in social media for images and video. Visuals are what the people want… give it to them! Now when you post that incredible infographic (like, say, one of these interesting social media infographics!) to your Facebook or Pinterest, you’ve got to start Tweeting it out, too. Or, start your own Vine marketing campaigns specifically to promote on Twitter.

The Future of Twitter Advertising

If we can look at Instagram and Facebook as predictors of social media trends (which I think we can), then this has some more implications for the future of advertising on Twitter, too.

Since all competing social media outlets seem to understand they have to follow each other’s innovations in order to keep up (or, in advertising trends’ case, keep up with revenue), it’s not unlikely we’ll start seeing visual sponsored ads from Twitter in the future. So watch where you click!

To get the rest of the specifics on the recent Twitter update, get it from the horse’s mouth on the Twitter blog.

Love it? Hate it? Please share what you think in the comments below, and let us know your plans for Twitter marketing with this update!