Twitter rolls out ability to add photo, video to Retweet

Twitter wants you to do more with Retweets. The Retweet feature which till only allowed users to add text, now in a new update allow users to add a photo, video or GIF to a Retweet. The new update is available globally on iOS, Android and on tthe mobile website.

While the update might look minor, however, the addition of multimedia features will significantly impact the amount of media that’s shared on the platform.

Presently, the most common behaviour while retweeting is to add a comment with it. The new update will further open up Retweet to support media which will likely lead to the increase of the non-text content you see on your timeline when you scroll through.

‘It's easy to express yourself by Retweeting with a comment. What if you could take it a step further and include media? Starting today, you can! Retweet with photos, a GIF, or a video to really make your reaction pop. Available on iOS, Android, and https://mobile.twitter.com,’ the company said in a statement.

The addition of more formats while Retweeting will make tthe Twitter move away from its original goal of offering a public SMS-type platform. The company earlier added live streaming video from users, live video from media partners and audio broadcasting, and also doubled the character limit to 280. All the changes combined the new Twitter platform has largely deviated itself from ‘text status updates, to something which is more media rich and engaging. Twitter hopes it will increase users’ time on Twitter and its ad revenues, something which the micro-blogging platform has been struggling from past couple of years.

In January, Twitter rolled out reverse-chronological timeline for Android smartphone users allowing them to switch to the timeline as per their choice.

The feature was already present in the iOS version. The micro-blogging platform has over 326 million active users.