So Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo announced some new changes to the Twitter platform that will help plug some leaks in Twitter’s user-retention by providing more value for it’s users and helping new users find reasons to stick around during that awkward 0 followers phase.

Instant Timeline

The introduction of Instant Timeline changes what people see from day one when they sign up with Twitter. It will give the new users an easy way to follow the accounts most relevant to them and start seeing messages right away, rather than facing a silent wall.

This is actually a pretty solid feature that I’m all for. Twitter can be a pretty intimidating place for new users with it’s own rhythm, language and rules. It’s hard enough to figure out what a damn hashtag is, trying to find people to follow that are relevant to you can be even more difficult.

While You Were Gone

Twitter will now show users the most popular messages they missed when they were gone from the site with highlights from their timelines. With Twitter there has always been the risk that you won’t see a message you might enjoy just because you weren’t watching at just the right moment. Now, Twitter will do some curating to catch you up on what you missed, not unlike how Facebook manages your News Feed with the posts it thinks you’d most enjoy.

Another solid update in my opinion for the platform. Twitter is a firehose of information and unless you’re sitting in front of your screen, you’re going to miss a whole bunch of tweets which can lead to some serious FOMO. Being able to see a recap will be great but let’s not sing any major praises yet. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion these recaps are going to be pretty heavily branded.

Because Video

Video is an all-important area for all social media, and Twitter has its Vine app for users to film six-second clips. However, Twitter is building video capabilities right into its main app for people to tweet footage, and brands are increasingly using video in their Twitter messages.

Video capabilities right into the platform? I’m all about this. Sure this means that you’ll most definitely have to start using Twitter’s native platform to tweet just like you have to do when posting images, but if we’re talking watching actual video from your Twitter stream I’m all for it.

More Obnoxious Celebrity Fans

Celebrity is one of Twitter’s main draws, and 200 million fans go to Twitter to see a star’s profile but they don’t actually stick around. Twitter is tweaking celebrity pages now, and it will start pointing these visitors to other high-profile accounts in an attempt to get the fly-by users to stick around and maybe even sign up.

I’m not super into this from a personal standpoint, but from a business and growth standpoint it’s right on the money. Unfortunately, the internet and Twitter are already loaded with the asinine tweets of fangirls/fanboys, tweens and lurkers and this could just bring more noise to an already crowded party. Thank gawd for lists though, AMIRIGHT?

What are your thoughts about Twitter’s new update? How much time do you typically spend on the platform and how have your Tweeting habits changed over time?

Catch the full article via Adweek here.

What do Pepsi, McDonald’s, K-Mart and Home Depot all have in common? They’re one of many big name brands that have had started a social media wildfire and now you can add The New England Patriots to this ever-growing list.

In honor of hitting their most recent Twitter milestone of 1 million followers, the Patriots were creating custom personalized digital jersey’s with the @names of users who retweeted the message about the milestone (see tweet below).

But an alleged “failed filtering system” allowed a custom made digital jersey displaying one user’s incredibly offensive name – how that was allowed by Twitter is a whole other can of worms – to all of the Twitterverse. (NSFW due to some offensive language)

Let me break this down for you folks.

If your filtering system is anything other than 1) one, or more, human beings and 2) properly trained, then you’re doing it wrong. Notice there are two distinct parts to that answer.

In their efforts to create a contest of such a large scale, the Pats, more than likely, used an automated stream to create these digital jerseys en masse that was clearly running unchecked. Basic risk analysis (i.e. “Could anything negative happen?) could have nipped this in the bud. Even some quality checking which could have people trying to just break the contest, could have prevented this before anything happened. But EVEN IF you didn’t have either of those, which most small businesses don’t, all could have been avoided with a simple approval system and a properly trained person.

For an organization like this and a contest of this size, it would need to be a team of people strapped into their seats, staring at a dashboard approving, or disapproving photos, making sure that everything was on the level. More importantly, those people should have already been properly trained in the platform. Now you don’t need to be a genius to scan names and prevent bad ones from going out, but why risk it?

That may sound like a costly waste of resources and perhaps even inefficient, but no matter how fast Social Media and the internet is, incidents like these stay with a company for a long time. The extra resources up front are far less than the resources used to repair the damage and control the situation.

This does not mean, never automate anything.

There are plenty of tools (one of my favorites is Buffer) out there to use that can help you better use your time and allow yourself to work “bigger.” But the best tools REQUIRE human interaction in one fashion or another.

At this point, with all of the prime examples out there of what not to do, it may be a simple case of hubris by big organizations who either STILL don’t fully respect social media, believe themselves to be above the other mishaps or too big to be affected by them.

Whatever the reason, these social media wildfires can be easily prevented by investing a little more time and resources. In case you skipped to the bottom, that means you need to put a properly-trained person smack in between the button being pressed and the situation exploding.

Or perhaps the rest of us just need constant reminders about social media automation and organizations are all working together to keep us sharp and vigilant in an effort to “give back.”