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I have now been granted access to the new Twitter design, so I thought I’d do up a quick post about the changes and most importantly, what you as a small business owner need to know.

New look

Here’s what it used to look like…

And here’s the new layout…

The redesign brings with it a totally new look for your profile that is being compared to Facebook and Google Plus. There’s a cover photo with a profile pic that overlaps it. There are 3 columns now instead of 2. All the elements of the profile page are much bigger.

If you don’t like how it looks, or you feel that you need a different cover photo or profile pic (Twitter will automatically resize what you have as your header and profile image to fit with the new design) you can elect to roll out the new layout at a later time.

You’ll notice when you look at your tabs for followers and following, instead of the concise list of before, everything is bigger.

Your followers page used to look like this…

It now looks like this…

I personally find this a bit more cumbersome to deal with.  I also miss the ability to click on a follower and get a little popup window with a snapshot of their profile (numbers and latest tweets – helps me to determine quality accounts when deciding who to follow). Now when you click on the follower, you get shifted to their full profile and need to click back (and lose your place if you’re scrolling down a list of followers).

All the elements from the left hand navigation, are in a new position. Important stuff like tweets, photos, following, followers and lists are in an horizontal menu bar at the top of your profile.

And the background?

As you can see with the new design, your background image disappears. However, it is still in view on other tabs such as “Home” and “Discover” (at least for now). And if someone clicks on a specific tweet of yours, you also still see the background image.

To-do: Look at your images to make sure they work with the new design.

What you have right now for your header and your profile pic will automatically shift over and be resized by Twitter. This might work just fine. Or not. So check in to see how it looks (and consider delaying the new design until you’ve had time to create images that work). And given the disappearance of the background, you might want to shift some of the important info to the header image.

The cover photo is 1500 x 500 pixels. The profile picture is 400 x 400 pixels

My friends at inlineVision have a free template you can use for the new design – access it here.

New features

Your tweets will change size depending on popularity. So if it’s a popular tweet (and by popular I mean it has been retweeted, favorited and or replied to), it will get bigger. That’s kinda cool.

You will also notice that now when you follow new tweeps, this activity will show up in your tweets feed.

You can now pin tweets. Just like Facebook, pin a tweet and it will sit at the very top of your profile.  Just click on the 3 little dots under your tweet to bring up the pin option.

And now it will sit at the top of your Twitter profile – note that you can only have one tweet pinned at a time (just like Facebook posts).

To-do: Start pinning your important tweets to the top of your feed so that anyone that visits your profile sees what you want them to right off the bat.

So, the change is mostly visual in nature, but there are some interesting aspects to it. What do you think of the new design? How much do you actually visit Twitter profiles of other users? Meet you in the comments…

Tagged as: social media, twitter