Changes to Twitter Improves Social Offering, Says Punch Communications

Recent announcements by Twitter have heralded changes to the social media platform illustrating how it is evolving and improving. These developments in functionality will be beneficial for brands and social media agencies improving its capabilities within the social media sphere.

Twitter has announced an improvement in its search facility and a partnership with Photobucket to host photos. When live, this means users will be able to upload a photo attached to a tweet right from twitter.com, virtually making twitpic and yfrog redundant. The new version of Twitter Search promises "more relevant" tweets, but also shows you related visuals (video and pictures) in the right hand side pane. Interestingly, Twitter has partnered with Mozilla creating a new version of Firefox with Twitter built into the search bar. For example, users can type a #hashtag or @username directly into the address bar to go right to a search results page or someones.

While there has been much speculation about Twitter's move into photo hosting, the more significant news is how they have changed their search product. It has been completely rebuilt and while it may not be immediately obvious, the product should be much improved. Twitter details the improvements on their engineering blog.

Benedict Heath, account director at PR, social media and SEO agency, said: "Twitter has gone from strength to strength in its 5 year lifetime with a reported 2,200 tweets-per-second on average with 18,000 queries per second - 1.6 billion queries per day, up from 1 billion last October. With search becoming more relevant to users and brands, the partnership with Mozilla Firefox is a significant move."

Twitter also states that quality and scale will continue to improve. This development comes following Twitter's recent acquisition of Tweetdeck demonstrating its desire to compete with Google.

Punch Communications is an integrated PR agency offering PR, Search and Social Media services, on a stand-alone or integrated basis. For further information, contact Benedict Heath at Tel. 01858 411600 benedict.heath@punchcomms.com