Recent Twitter Changes

This post was originally published on thenextweb.com

 Twitter Alerts for emergencies

Twitter’s users helped it to grow organically into a place for updates on breaking news and emergencies. Thankfully, Twitter has taken advantage of this and introduced Twitter Alerts to make this process even smoother and more reliable.

After releasing Lifelife last year to help Japanese users find emergency accounts during crises, the Twitter team has moved on to helping users worldwide get emergency information when they need it.

You’ll need to sign up for alerts before you’ll receive any notifications. You can sign up by visiting twitter.com/[username]/alerts of a participating account and subscribing to the account’s alerts. When you visit a profile on the web, you can also tell whether the account is offering Twitter Alerts.So far the list of included accounts including organizations from the U.S., Japan and Korea, with more to come.

When an account you subscribed to sends out a Twitter Alert, you’ll get an SMS notification as well as a push notification is you’re using Twitter for iPhone (version 5.10 or higher) or Twitter for Android (4.1.6 or higher).

Alerts will also appear in your Twitter timeline with an orange bell icon to distinguish them from regular Tweets.

@officialfolks for recommended follows

You might have heard about Twitter’s experimental account @officialfolks recently. The account’s bio says that it “sends instant, personalized recommendations for users and content via direct message.”

 Scheduled tweets

A more exclusive recent update is the recent addition of a tweet-scheduling feature. This one is only available to Twitter Ads users, so many of us will see these scheduled Tweets but won’t have access to try them for ourselves—at least for now.

The popularity of this topic, especially when the best time to Tweet is, has often been discussed, most recently we’ve written about it in “A scientific guide to posting Tweets, Facebook posts, Emails and Blog posts at the best time“, which has stirred some discussion. Twitter’s change follows in that direction.

Twitter Ads users can schedule either Promoted or organic Tweets to be sent at specific dates and times up to a year in advance. Of course, this can be useful for marketers who want to promote time-sensitive events on Twitter, like product releases or premieres.

Twitter has included two ways to create these scheduled Tweets: one is the simple blue Tweet button on the navigation bar at ads.twitter.com, and the other is inside a new Creatives tab inside Twitter Ads accounts. The Creatives tab lets advertisers create scheduled Tweets and Twitter Cards from one place.A lot of people have also asked us if it’s now a good idea to stop using whichever social media management app they are using right now and switch over to scheduled Tweets with Twitter.

The short answer to this we found is that since Twitter’s scheduled Tweets product is tied to their Ads product it will likely not be a great replacement for Buffer, or any other social media management app you might be using.

Twitter for Android tablets

While Twitter for Android has been available for some time, a Twitter experience optimized for Android tablets was only recently released.

The app includes several unique features that were developed with the help of Samsung, including a multi-screen view that lets you run Twitter and another app at the same time. There’s also a feature that lets you create illustrations to share on Twitter, or draw directly on your photos.

iOS 7 updates

Twitter jumped on board with iOS 7 about a month ago, announcing new version of Twitter for iPhone and iPad with a refreshed design.

The updates came with some new features as well, including the ability to see what music is trending on Twitter with the Twitter #music station on iTunes Radio and searching Twitter with Siri.