Twitter, the social networking website which holds second position in the respective category after Facebook has recently taken a step forward to update their website in an attempt to offer a more interactive experience to its users and fierce competiiton to rivals.
It can be said, as Twitter announced on June 13 that it has updated its "expanded tweets" feature, which will allow its registered users to see more previews, images and videos from a growing list of news outlets - inside tweets via a desktop or mobile browser.
"When you expand Tweets containing links to partner websites, you can now see content previews, view images, play videos and more," Twitter said in a blog post.
To make it clearer, here is an example. A tweet containing a URL for a newspaper article can be expanded to display the headline, an introduction and potentially the Twitter accounts of the publisher and writer. Users can also expand tweets containing links to partner companies to view photographs and videos within their Twitter feeds.
According to Brian Blau, analyst at Gartner, the feature is likely to keep people on Twitter's website for longer.
Blau said in a PCWorld report, "We already know that tweets that have links in them are more valuable for users, so if you're looking to expand even further the value of those tweets, you can give people the decision to click off the site, or [not to] if they have enough information from the tweet."
According to its blog post, Twitter also expects the media partnership program to grow.
Its partners so far include The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, blogs including BuzzFeed and TMZ, and video content providers including Lifetime and some BET programs.
Also, partner websites listed in the announcement were The San Francisco Chronicle, Der Spiegel Online, WWE, Buzzfeed, Lifetime and Dailymotion.
According to Mashable reports, Soundcloud also revealed recently that it is a partner. Audio clips from Soundcloud will now appear in expanded tweets.
Previously, expanded tweets showed videos from YouTube and photographs from Instagram. However, the expanded tweet above from @BETawards shows a slick new video gallery.
According to Twitter post, it has been informed that this update is available to users on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com starting Wednesday, June 13. Further, it will gradually roll out to Twitter app for iPhone and Android "soon."
