NEW YORK (AP) — As Twitter looks to broaden its appeal
beyond its 241 million users, the company is introducing a redesign of
profile pages that includes bigger photos, more user controls and a
distinct resemblance to Facebook.
"Moment by moment, your Twitter
profile shows the world who you are," the company wrote in a blog post
Tuesday. "Starting today, it will be even easier (and, we think, more
fun) to express yourself through a new and improved Web profile."
As
part of changes coming in the next few weeks, users who access Twitter
via the Web will notice larger photos on their profile pages. Besides
profile photos on the left corner of the page, the redesign includes a
large banner photo that resembles the big rectangular cover photos on
Facebook pages. Users will be able to "pin" one of their tweets to the
top of the page to give others an idea of the topics they like to tweet
about. In addition, tweets that receive the most interest from other
users will appear slightly larger.
The more visual look is an
attempt to attract people who may be intimidated by Twitter’s onslaught
of text filled with quirky acronyms, at-symbols and hashtags. The
changes come at a time when Facebook is adding features to its site that
are Twitter-like, highlighting the way the two companies are jockeying
for people’s time and advertisers’ dollars.
Is Twitter saying a
picture is worth 140 characters? Perhaps not. The new profiles don’t
apply to Twitter’s mobile app, which is a more popular way to access the
service than the website. Mobile is also where Twitter earns most of
its money. EMarketer expects about 77 percent of Twitter’s estimated
$1.1 billion in advertising revenue to come from mobile this year.
Even
so, Twitter has acknowledged that it needs to reach a bigger audience.
CEO Dick Costolo described the effort in broad terms during the
company’s February earnings call with analysts.
"By bringing the
content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language
of Twitter to the background," Costolo said, "we can increase high
quality interactions and make it more likely that new or casual users
will find the service as indispensable as our existing core users do."
Costolo
also promised more visually engaging content, of which the profile page
redesign is just one example. Last fall, the company decided to make
users’ feeds more visual by including previews from Twitter photos and
Vine videos.
Twitter’s first-quarter tally of users signaled that
growth is slowing on the service. The company added just 9 million new
monthly users in the fourth quarter, only 1 million of which came from
the U.S. It added an average of 16 million new accounts in each of the
first three quarters of 2013.
Twitter said in February that it had
241 million users at the end of 2013. By comparison, Facebook boasts
some 1.23 billion users, while WhatsApp, the messaging service Facebook
is buying for $19 billion, said it had 400 million active monthly users
last December.
Twitter has not yet reported its first-quarter
financial results, so it’s hard to tell if the slowdown is a sign of
trouble or just a blip. EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a
recent report that Twitter’s user base "may be growing more slowly than
expected, but the social service has steadily increased its ad revenue
and shown that its ads can drive engagement and interaction."
Noah
Elkin, executive editor at eMarketer, said advertisers "love the
engagement they get on Twitter." That said, he added that the company is
still under pressure to grow.
The redesigned profile page, Elkin
said, will likely have a "relatively minimal impact" on Twitter’s
advertising revenue, "unless and until" the company brings the new look
to its mobile app.
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