Earlier this week, Twitter announced a roll-out of a major re-design that includes important features to allow brands to improve the way they communicate and engage with their followers.

Hot on the heels of brand pages for Google+, and of particular interest to marketers, are the new, enhanced Twitter profile pages.  These brand pages will offer your business more control over how you present your company’s Twitter presence.

The new Twitter brand pages introduce two key changes to the current ‘one-size fits all’ profile page:

• Improved customisation. You’ll be able to customise your company’s Twitter profile page more prominently and consistently than before.  There’ll be support for adding a large header image plus your strap line and the visibility of these elements won’t, annoyingly, be dependent on the page’s content or the visitors’ display set-up.

• Promoted Tweet. You’ll be able to select an important tweet to remain at the top of your time line. Also that top tweet will auto-expand without requiring user interaction to reveal any media that your tweet links to e.g. a photo or a video.

Twitter enhanced profile page

The new interface will also have separate streams for your brand’s @mentions and @replies. This will make engaging with your followers more transparent and easier as these two interactions are very different.

The good news is that there is no cost for a brand page. The bad news is that only 21 of the big boys get to play with it for now including @bing, @DisneyPixar, @Heineken and @intel plus a few global fast-food and sugary-drink brands that I don’t care to mention…

Twitter claim to be rolling out the enhanced profile pages to lesser mortals over the ‘coming months’.

On the right is an example of an enhanced Twitter profile page.  For now, if you want to see any others, you’ll have to use Twitter’s latest apps for iPhone (no iPad support yet) or Android.