Much has been made of ThingLink's
newest addition today, which for those who haven't heard of it yet, allows you to embed its interactive images into your tweets via cards. This is interesting as it means you can fit in more links to external sites without compromising the original tweet, the 140 character limit meant that placing more than one link in a tweet makes it look spammy.
This is definitely something that brands will be interested in exploring as they can fit in multimedia links like images, videos, sound clips, messages, and in some examples, a purchase option. Ultimately, it reduces the number of steps required to complete an action and lets you convey far more for less. It also gives you the opportunity to tell a story that could really flesh out an image and give it far more weight.
What's also interesting is that ThingLink is partnered with Soundcloud, Spotify and Eventbrite meaning that already, there's far greater potential in store than you would expect. People are far more inclined to view an image on Twitter and adding interactive elements will ensure that more people will stay longer on Twitter's desktop site, which is exactly what the company wants.
The below tweet is a good example of how these interactive tweets can work. By placing tags over each product, users can find out more about details without having to leave their news feed. Unfortunately, the card doesn't work when you use the embed code (yet) so you'll have to click here to view it
.
Less Is More
So there's a lot of potential there for brands to. However, there are one or two things that the trap that brands should try not Looking at any of the example provided, the images tend to work better when there's less there, making it too busy or placing links haphazardly will make it look too busy and will detract from the experience. The above example works well as each tag is clearly defined and has a role, that is to alert you to new products available. Therefore, the image you use for this tweet is very important as you only want to place these tags on prominent locations that will catch your attention anyway.
The second caveat is that the experience won't translate as well on mobile as it does on your desktop. The obvious reason for this is the screen being used is a lot smaller so you really need to zoom in to see where the links are. They also appear automatically on mobile - unlike the desktop where they appear whenever you hover the mouse over the image - so you may need to keep that in mind if you're thinking of using them for a promotion.
That said, it's very early days for the format so brands have a lot of time to play around with the new format and see what does and doesn't work. Twitter did promise interactive tweets back in September and it's good to see it evolve the platform while maintaining the simple foundation that won it so many fans. It's clear this is the direction that Twitter want to take the service, this being one of a number of measures to ensure people are using its web and mobile service.
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