Twitter Launches 140 Second Video Uploads And A New Engage App

By @TheMarkDalton

Twitter is trying to make its video content appeal to users and make video in general more attractive on the platform. Why? Because if we have learnt one thing from the past year it is that video is huge right now. Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram…all blowing up with video content. Vine, which is Twitter’s 6 second looking video service has been struggling with influencers leaving for other platforms.

However, Twitter has announced today that users will now be able to share videos that are 140 seconds long. The limit had been 30 seconds up to now. Some creators will also be able to add a video to their Vine which will transform their six second video into a bigger story.

Basically, the unique selling point of Vine – the 6 second looping video – has now been killed stone dead. The changes come as Twitter is facing intense rivalry from Snapchat and Facebook Live which have both been a huge success from launch.

Twitter has recently integrated Periscope into the main Twitter app and yesterday they purchased a company called Magic Pony, a London based startup which specialises in sharpening low resolution and blurred videos in real time.

Twitter also announced a new app called Engage. This will be a standalone app directed at helping celebrities and popular accounts with lots of interaction to manage their accounts and help them to respond and interact with fans.

Engage will highlight the most important interactions on Twitter and will have a granular mentions tab that will allow you to see mentions from other verified accounts as well as mentions from us ‘normals’.

An “understand” tab will deliver high level analytics for your tweets showing you how many impressions you get over time. The posts tab will show detailed performance numbers for individual tweets.

The Engage app won’t have a timeline, it is focused on people who want to see what is happening in terms of account interactions but are not interested in the main conversation. It is a similar concept to Facebook’s mentions app.

Engage is launching in the App Store for iOS later today, no word on when it will be coming to Android and for the moment it will be starting as U.S. users only.

UPDATE: We were initially advised this would be a U.S. only launch today however the Engage app is currently populating in the Irish App Store at the moment if you want to grab it. The link is below:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twitter-engage/id1116850120?mt=8