Twitter changes! 5 Suggestions for adding picture posts to brighten Twitter up!

Ok, this is not about eyes. This post is about livening your Tweets up with images. You may have noticed that Twitter is displaying images and videos in Tweets to make the stream more like Tumblr and Facebook, with images streaming down where people attached them.

This change is aimed at making Twitter more visual. Tweets with images get retweeted and commented a lot more. This also helps Twitter compete with social media sites where there are a lot of images and video links.

There are a lot of new opportunities presented by this change. I am experimenting with adding pics to one in three of my Tweets. These, I hope, are relevant and interesting. The jury is out as to how they will be perceived by my followers, over 250,000 now on my different Twitter accounts, but I also believe this is an opportunity for compelling visual story telling about your offering. 

Thinking visually means we have to find good content that you own the rights to - I paid for the above image earlier this month at Videoblocks - and thinking about how to select images that relate to our posts. Some subjects will be easy to find images for. Others will not.

Here are some suggestions for adding images:

1. Take more pictures of what's around you, your office, your desk, your colleagues, your output, your city.

2. Make changes to images using Ifranview or Paint.net at getpaint.net. They are both free, but the paint.net program allows you to add layers easily.

3. Make friends or buy services from photographers and animators and artists. Value their work. This will be good thing for everyone who is visually minded.

4. Consider creating your own videos using the Vine app on your phone, wideo.com for free animations or Animoto.com for edited videos. All these services are free.

5. Create visual story boards about your products or services. Take multiple pictures of the process you go through to create what you do. Then post the images.

This is a revolutionary change to Twitter. It will force us to make our Tweets more interesting. That's all good, in my opinion. If you have any other suggestions for adding visual content please comment below. Or simply let me know what you think about this change to your Twitter stream.

Thanks for following too. Please click the link above to get my occasional posts on social media developments.   

Twitter Changes - The Moment of Truth

Image via CrunchBase

Two big changes are coming up in the Twitter universe in the next month.

Twitter will start rating Tweets as "none", "low", or "medium", with a reserved "high" tag for unspecified future use. 

The "medium" entries will approximate to the "Top Tweets" results for searches on twitter.com. This will allow applications to filter content from otherwise noisy or high-volume feeds.

This change is from the 20th February 2013. The tagging allows Twitter to create separate high rated Tweet streams. I see nothing wrong in this, but I hope that they present any paid for high rated tweets in a separate section of the screen, perhaps a box to the right of the current stream, as Google do for paid ads.

I hope they don't go down the Facebook route of only allowing your followers to see some of your posts/Tweets, depending on how often they click on your links and other nebulous factors.

The second serious change is the introduction of Twitter v1.1 API from March 5th, when a limited Twitter 1.0 shut off will be tested. I expect 1.1 will be rolled out over the weeks/months following the 5th, should 1.1 run smoothly.

1.1 will impact people using various Twitter tools. Some tools will have limits placed on the number of calls, Tweets, follows etc, which it can make in an hour. Some services in the Twitter eco-system may stop working.

The next few months will be interesting for all of us who have been amazed at the democratic and open nature of Twitter.

Here's some scenarios for what the above could lead to:

#Tweetstreams-as-ads that are dominated by paid for content, leading to a reduction in the appeal of Twitter.

#Censorship-of-Tweets. The ability of Twitter to remove all low value or "political/anti-establishment" tweets. 

#Growth-stunting The elimination of free apps such as bufferapp.com, which allows users to automate the process of Tweeting. These services may be replaced with higher cost services, which some SMEs, writers and other home workers won't be able to afford.  

The next few months will see the ground shifting for Twitter as it moves towards a stock market listing. 

English: Google+ wordmark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I imagine the executives at LinkedIn and Google+ are hoping for a misstep from Twitter in the next few months, which will give a new lease of life to their offerings for small and medium businesses. Or will Twitter get it right and courses on Twitter SEO become the rage a few years from now?

Come back again to see my take on how these changes are bedding down.