With the news surrounding the upcoming IPO, Twitter is going through a number of changes. After adding in conversations threads to the timeline, Twitter introduced a few days ago a more visual timeline by implementing already expanded preview of images.

Aside from the my initial apprehension of having an even more cluttered timeline (I still don’t like the conversation threads), over the course of the last few days I’ve grown to like the expanded tweets.

It’s especially important for marketers and advertisers to understand what changes are occurring in social media because it will have an effect on their plans. Especially this change on Twitter.

40% of people engage more with visual content versus text and tweets with images get 2X more engagement than ones without. So, it’s safe to say that this engagement means big things for marketers to take advantage of.

Twitter Expanded Image Update

Think about all of the possibilities for images on Twitter now? How effective are promoted Tweets with images now? Does this increase the amount of time people spend on Twitter daily, weekly, or monthly?

Here’s what we’ve found so far. We’ve broken down what this change looks like, the size of the images, how Twitter is resizing the expansion, implementing Vine videos and a free template download. Seize the opportunity marketers!

What does it look like?

On Tuesday, I went up to my bookmarks bar and clicked on the link for Twitter, which brought me to my account and my immediate thought was…”WTF. What is this?!” I refreshed the page thinking that it was a bug, but it wasn’t. It was the new, more visual timeline had me shocked at first and then I have really grown to like the change.

Here’s what my timeline has looked like so far….

Don’t mind the Halloween Pictures….

And here’s a mobile view…

Size

When you upload a photo to Twitter the size of the file can be up to 3MB and must be a gif, jpeg, or png file. And Twitter states that it will be automatically scaled for display expanded Tweet and in your user gallery.

The size of the expanded card on your timeline is 438 x 220px.

What about Vine?

A Vine video will be scaled the same way as an image (explained in more depth below) and feature the cover shot of the video.

Template

We’ve created this template for you to help pinpoint what the focus will be when you upload images to Twitter and their view on the timeline. We’ve tested several pictures to figure out the right formula for you and even asked some folks at Twitter.

The conclusion is that after uploading the image, Twitter does try and perform some sort of facial recognition and/or focuses in on the central part of the image. For smaller images Twitter will also do the same function described before.

It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t map it down to an exact formula for you. However, we did test using our template and uploading an image to Twitter and here’s what we’ve found.

I started with a graphic created yesterday for Laura’s post on consistency…

I then turned my template on with the guidelines to identify the size of the expanded picture on TrackMaven’s Twitter timeline and it’s size. Although, we can’t figure out the exact formula of this, I did choose a for the focus of the graphic to be more central and centered it based on the template space.

Then I saved the graphic as a jpg sized as a square (590×590). After I then took the image to Twitter, where I composed my tweet and uploaded the graphic to…

and ta-da!

Now, it condensed the image some; however, the quote remained the central focus. As mentioned before, this is a little different for photos and Twitter does have some sort of facial recognition going on; yet, they are still figuring out what works best.

EX: This photo of Ruby and me…

I guess I would pick Ruby as the central focus too.

Twitter doesn’t exactly have it down just yet, but then again it’s only been a few days since the implementation. Yet, this template will help you narrow down the focus for your images when uploading them to tweets.

Template to Download

Tweet us pictures that you are using with the template (@TrackMaven) or have you figured out your own formula? Let us know!