Brands Experiment With Twitter's New Photo Collages

Meow Mix, Izze and General Electric Are Early Adopters

By Cotton Delo. Published on March 28, 2014

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Twitter announced earlier this week that it would start letting users share up to four photos within a single tweet, as well as tag up to 10 other users in a photo ina Facebook-like way.

Some early-adopting brands are already experimenting with the ability to share more photos -- which appear in a collage format underneath the text of a tweet -- and effectively pack their tweets with more content.

The new features are a continuation of Twitter's efforts to give tweets more visual impact and another step away from the spareness and simplicity the service was known for back when a post could include only 140 characters and nothing else.

In October, Twitter introduced "media-forward timelines," a design change that caused photos to automatically display in users' streams. Previously, a user needed to click on a link to see a photo.

The change let users and brands take up more space in people's tweet streams. Now photo collages have the potential to let them do more storytelling with the space they have and go well beyond the former 140-character boundary.

Here are today's brand testers:

Meow Mix
The cat-food brand uses a Twitter collage to tell a story.

Izze
The PepsiCo-owned sparkling-juice brand has packed four recipes into a single tweet.

General Electric
Perennial early adopter GE gathers artful photographs of heavy machinery. It was also first to experiment with Twitter's line breaks when it promoted a tweet for Pi Day last year.

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