Yesterday, Twitter announced the roll-out of custom timelines, which will see users able to curate and organise tweets in a style similar to Storify. We ask some key players in the social media sector what this move, made only a week after Twitter went public, will mean.
Delia Goldsby, director PR and social, RBH
When I first saw the latest news coming through about the prospect of a Twitter Custom timeline function, I must admit I did a little happy dance. The ability to quickly and easily curate, in a non-chronological time line, a collection of tweets around a hot topic, conversation or hashtag, and then be able to embed into a website or share to other social platforms is going to be pretty useful. Thinking about it from the PR and marketing agency perspective I’m convinced it will be a powerful addition to the social insight toolbox. Anything that gives us more capability to study and derive more conversation insight and meaning from social platforms like Twitter has got to be a big benefit.
Robin Grant, global managing director, We Are Social
With dust only just starting to settle on Twitter's IPO, it didn't take long for the platform to start unveiling updates. Custom timelines on Tweetdeck have been launched in a drive to increase Twitter's userbase, which currently stands at around 230 million, by making it more accessible and empowering the user. When a topic "takes off" on Twitter, users will be able to create a separate timeline of the most relevant tweets, curating their own themed streams of data away from the clutter of a standard Twitter timeline, which will be publicly accessible and available to embed on websites. While custom timelines are a sensible move from Twitter, they're hardly revolutionary. Third party app Storify has already been allowing users to save and organise tweets for some time now. Custom timelines are essentially Twitter's own version of this, with a few additional capabilities. Realistically, this looks less like a major platform update than an exercise in keeping investors happy.
Steve Cater, head of digital, whynot!
Yesterday’s announcement is an exciting new development that allows curators to spread custom twitter conversations far and wide on the internet. It’s another smart move that gives users a great reason to curate their own topics both on twitter and elsewhere.What I really like about this announcement is that it is also an archive feature. Twitter is great at in the moment conversations. To the user it is relentless, an ongoing in the now stream of news, opinion and real time conversation. This new development captures things that happened and better allows control over certain types of conversations. Curation is king.The feature will likely only be used by a small minority of users. However, it will be interesting to see what other people are interested, topic-led rather than user-led.
Jim Dowling, managing partner, Cake
The best bit about Twitter just got better.All social networks are social and have similarities. You can share, chat and trawl across all of them. In order for a social platform to thrive, it needs its own unique-ness.Twitter has found its place as a wonderful accompaniment to the live and televised world. It makes watching telly more enjoyable, it provides richer, more immediate news consumption, and it unites people around sporting and cultural events. This is Twitter at its unique best. Custom timelines should make that experience smarter and more appealing to a mainstream audience. Good idea I reckon.
Holly Rodgers, social media and marketing manager, Early Bird Social Media
When I first found out about Twitter rolling out 'Custom Timelines' I knew this was a tool which would save me huge amounts of time. As a social media and marketing manager I need to see the important tweets and information I am looking for quickly. I need to source information for my clients in various different industries which this will allow me to do with ease. This is fantastic for engagement! Our visitors can now reply and retweet our updates without even leaving our website. This is a huge step forward and massively lowers friction with regards to encouraging Twitter engagement from your website.
Jason Sumner, technology analyst,The Economist Intelligence Unit
Twitter's latest announcement on custom timelines shows the amount of behind the scenes planning that went into its IPO. Investors were essentially betting on future innovation from the micro-blogger and we can expect the company to release more new initiatives over the coming weeks to build on the strong opening. Some ideas will work and some will not but the important thing now is to show the R and D machine is churning out new initiatives to drive up the user base, especially outside the US, and get creative with mobile ads.
Tim Pritchard, head of social media, Manning Gottlieb OMD
Twitter’s introduction of the custom timelines will give the platform a real opportunity to capitalise on what it does best, surfacing real-time conversation, especially around ‘moments’ and events.Since the advent of hashtag pages for major sporting events like #Nascar and #London2012, brands and advertisers have been beating down Twitter’s door to offer additional curation options, especially useful around sporting events and sponsorships, and these look like the answer they’ve been waiting for. This update will further Twitter’s reach out into the rest of the web, and prompt yet more adoption of hashtags into offline comms, all of which are likely ensure their continued rise in user base and inclusion in integrated marketing campaigns. It is also interesting to see Twitter pushing Tweetdeck as the launch vehicle for this, although it will later be available on API, it shows that they are pushing their proprietary management tool having been fairly quiet about it for a while.
