“Tweet only” view finally comes to Twitter profiles

I’ve been waiting for Twitter to change the way you see tweets on a profile page for years. And finally today I noticed it had happened! 🥂🍾. This isn’t (completely) my inner geek getting excited, it’s also an important consideration for brands’ Twitter architectures.

Here’s a screen grab from a profile page on Twitter on the mobile app (I’m using Under Armour for no particular reason, the change is on all profiles). Previously the “Tweets” option didn’t exist on mobile, but now it’s the default. Boom.

This meant that when you went to a brand’s profile, you were confronted with both “original” tweets from the brand and @replies all mixed in together. The best a brand could do was to use the (very useful) pin-to-top feature.

Why the previous situation wasn’t great

• Most people don’t really care about other people’s questions for a brand, so they were seeing all sorts of stuff irrelevant to them.
• For brands like utilities which typically have lots of complaints, it didn’t exactly showcase the brand in a positive light.
• People who actually wanted to look at content from the brand would have to scroll back, trying to pick out tweet flowers from amongst the @reply weeds.

Why should brands be interested in this change?

Brands should take note for two main reasons:

1. When someone now visits your profile page you know they’ll see your history of tweets… they might even scroll back and read some. How might that impact on the creative, or even using Twitter as more of a story telling platform?
2. I’ve spoken many times about not separating out your Twitter customer care onto a separate @care handle. One of the few reasons I used to concede for doing so was the mess a profile page could look on a mobile device (as described above). I’m very happy to see this is now no longer an issue.

So, if you’re looking at your Twitter setup, re-consider bringing everything under one tidy Twitter roof. Consumers don’t see brands as different departments (marketing, customer care etc), they just see the brand… so why not reflect that in your social setup.