Twitter Launches New Brand Pages To Compete With Facebook

Brands, welcome to Twitter. We know you've been here for a while, but now it looks like you can really start to call it home. Twitter has launched a total redesign of its web and mobile apps today, and along with that it has unveiled brand new "brand pages", where brands can more fully control the content that their followers see. AdAge reports that during the unveiling of Twitter's new redesign, Adam Bain, Twitter's Chief Revenue Officer, proudly showed off the also-newly redesigned brand pages. Technically speaking, brands have always had a "page" on Twitter. However, the old profiles were pretty bland: the same as any other user's profile, brands were stuck with very little customization in terms of their logo (other than the small avatar), bio, and tweets. Now, it looks like brands will be able to get a lot more cozy with Twitter. Brand pages will enjoy the same redesign as other profiles on Twitter (in the new "me" section) with two key differences: Brands will be able to customize a large header image that looks like it will span the entire width of the page, to display their logo and tagline more prominently than before. Brands can "pin" a tweet to the top of their timeline, which will include an expanded view of any multimedia that it may contain. Here's a screenshot of what the new brand pages will look like: As AdAge reports, the new features on the brand pages will be free of charge. Other, smaller changes include separating out a brand's @replies and @mentions, which is aimed at helping customer service-oriented brands maintain consistent messaging on Twitter. Twitter announced that it would be launching with 21 brand partners for the initial launch of the new pages: American Express, Best Buy, Bing, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell , Disney, General Electric, Hewlitt-Packard, Intel, JetBlue, Kia, McDonald's, Nike , PepsiCo, Staples, Verizon Communications Wireless, NYSE Euronext, Heineken, Subway and Paramount Pictures. All of these brands have had a close relationship with Twitter, and have been early partners in its beta Promoted Products program. Adam Bain explains that these marketers are already very active on Twitter: "The question for each one of these marketers is what is the interesting, compelling, provocative content that they can be putting out to a larger audience to keep that engagement [that they already enjoy on Twitter] high." No firm dates were given as to when these new brand pages would be available to more advertisers, but as with anything Twitter does, you can expect this rollout to be slow and methodical. And although nothing was directly said about competing with Facebook, that's clearly one of Twitter's ambitions with the new pages. A page that is customizable and able to be controlled more closely will be attractive to many brands - and although this likely won't be enough to get them to switch from Facebook, it might just entice those who only have a Facebook page to add Twitter to their repertoire.

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Twitter Launches New Brand Pages To Compete With Facebook

Lauren Dugan

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