Over the past few weeks, Twitter has added some new functionality to its platform. To keep you updated we have collated the information into this handy blog post.
Accessibility
You can now make your Twitter feed more accessible to people with a visual impairment. You can add descriptions to your images in a similar way to how you would add ‘alt’ descriptions to web images.
To add descriptions to your images you first need to activate the function in your Twitter settings. Click on Settings & Privacy > Accessibility > Compose Image Descriptions – then toggle this option on.
When you compose a Tweet and add an image you will notice you now have an ‘add description’ option. You can add a description to your image (not GIFs or videos) of up to 420 characters.
Push Notifications
Twitter is starting to push personalised news alerts to users using a mix of algorithms and humans to decide who gets what. The alert will link to a Twitter Moment, which is a collection of tweets about the topic (compiled by humans).
Photo Cropping
Twitter has shared how it crops photos that are uploaded to “improve consistency and to allow you to see more Tweets at a glance”. In the past, the crop used to focus on the centre of an image which sometimes missed the crucial part of the photo. Now, neural networks are used to identify areas of the image with high contrast to predict what people might want to look at.
This is quite a useful update which you can read more about here.
What do you think of the latest Twitter updates? Do let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Do you want to learn more about how to use Twitter for marketing? Why not take our Twitter for Business online course?