Are The New Twitter Pages A Business Opportunity?

Here comes the good news! Twitter announced a major updates on the micro-blogging platform, new designs and new enhanced profile pages for brands. So far, everyone looks pretty exciting about the news and keeps talking about the advantages of the new layout.

Of course, we like the idea of the new design with embedded Tweets, Discover button, etc. that make the platform easier for new users, but as a business, we were more interested about this important new feature: the new brand pages, and how it will be beneficial for our clients.

Customization, Engagement, and Expandable media
Businesses will have to wait till February to enjoy the new design, but Twitter revealed 21 lucky partners’ brand pages including Dell and Coca Cola, that had the change to create their own twitter page already. After having a look at them, few advantages directly came up in mind:

First, this is finally a great opportunity to personalize more and more your page. Your logo is bigger and you can customize your own large header. Secondly, the brand can select which of its tweets to display on top of the page, even if it isn’t the most recent, the selected tweet will be promoted on the page and auto-expended to showcase videos or pictures. Thirdly, as a page admin, the most useful feature will be the distinction between the @replies and the @mentions of the brand. It’s a significant tool especially for marketers who like to connect and engage frequently with their customers. By default, the @replies will be filtered out to remain in a separate page providing an easier and efficient way to handle customer’s enquiries, which is clearly more important than handling @mentions.

Business Vs. Personal
We have to agree that this latest initiative will help make the platform more consumer-friendly; however, we still need to point out some question marks left. These pages will only be viewable on Twitter.com, and if we think about it twice, most of people around us use a third party applications, so we are still wondering what will be the look on those dashboards?

Besides, why should a marketer create a brand page on Twitter, if he already has a Facebook page, Foursquare page, LinkedIn page, Google+ page? After all, it depends on the kind of business and the social media strategy put in place, but realistically as a social media actor, big brands MUST have a presence on all platforms while keeping in mind to have the right content for each platform in order to avoid repeating the same information over and over again.