It seems that Twitter and Instagram are still at it, and yesterday Twitter made the most recent move in the break-up. Since Instagram, owned by Facebook, will no longer allow users to share beautifully edited and filtered photos on Twitter, the ever-famous micro blogging network will now be updating their photo options. Twitter has now announced that in order to keep those Instagram-like photos on their network, they will just have to let Twitter users create them themselves. It seems that Twitter will be becoming a lot more visual these days, which may open some new doors for marketers interested in marketing with the network, or those who already do.
Starting today, you’ll be able to edit and refine your photos, right from Twitter. The latest versions of Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android introduce a few new ways to enhance the images you tweet. We’re grateful to our partner, Aviary, for powering our filters and effects.
Filters. Apply one of eight filters, ranging from black & white to vintage, to add a new look and feel to your photos.
Take a bird’s-eye view. See how each filter would affect your photo in a single grid view, or swipe through looks to compare your options.
Frame the action. Crop and pinch to zoom in order to focus attention.
Auto-enhance. Make your photos pop with balanced light and colors by tapping the wand.
From the Twitter Blog
The feature that Twitter has just released is almost identical to everything that Instagram is and offers to its users. With this feature, Twitter is assuring that it stays as close to even with Facebook as it possibly can. With Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, Twitter needed something similar to keep them in the race.
Clearly, this new feature is largely because of Instagram’s, rather Facebook’s, removal of all photos from Twitter. However, the problem for marketers is that Twitter is allowing very little sharing to be done now, in terms of sharing across multiple networks.  It puts more work in the hands of marketers, as without much sharing across platforms, marketers have to create different content for each network they are on, instead of simply hitting Share.
Despite that though, if anything good does come of this for marketers, it is that more content options are available on Twitter now. Sure, photos on Twitter have been around for a while, but much like we have seen Instagram create a huge boost in Facebook photo sharing, we will see similar activity on Twitter.
With this feature being created solely for the mobile platform, Twitter is clearly catering to the huge switch to mobile devices by users that has been occurring in recent months. Social networks will always compete with one another, and when an innovation appears in the social world, others have to do whatever they can to keep up, even if that means imitating the entire functionality of Instagram. Twitter’s edge is that it is quite popular among social mobile users, and they are keeping the photo filtering and social activity all in one place.
A video explaining the new feature is available here, on the Twitter Blog.
