Twitter is stepping up its monetization efforts in a big way. Following the sponsored tweets, brand pages, hashtag pages, paid trending topic, and paid suggested account, Twitter today announced expanded tweets for brands. Viewable on Twitter’s main and mobile websites, tweets that contain links to certain websites will have their contents previewed.
Expanded tweets had actually been rolled out previously on a larger scale for images hosted on particular sites such as Photobucket through Twitter’s image hosting deal, Twitpic, and Instagram, as well as videos on YouTube. This new deal brings text, videos and images by brands into greater prominence on Twitter. Launch partners include The Wall Street Journal, Breaking News, TIME, New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Der Spiegel Online, WWE, TMZ, BuzzFeed, Lifetime, Dailymotion, and more.
Using expanded tweets, Twitter users will be able to enjoy many linked content without having to leave the Twitter website. When it comes to articles or blog posts however, Twitter only shows the first few lines and will therefore drive traffic back to the origin of the link.
Currently, expanded content for brands are viewable only on Twitter’s own websites with updates to its iPhone and Android apps to accommodate this change to come soon. The blog post did not mention anything about Twitter’s own TweetDeck but with the desktop and browser-based app already supporting the more common version of content rich tweets, it’s likely that TweetDeck will receive support eventually. TweetDeck mobile on the other hand remains untouched since September 2011.
It doesn’t seem like Twitter will roll this out to third party apps as that might include a complicated revenue sharing agreement between Twitter, app developers, and the brands themselves.
Last year Twitter’s Ryan Sarver warned that developers should stay away from making regular Twitter apps that work just like Twitter’s own. It looks like the company was trying to ensure that the majority of Twitter users access the service through its own properties to maximize exposure for its sponsored products.
