Showcase Twitter Stories with Grids

Allison Howen
by Allison Howen 22 Oct, 2015

Twitter is helping users better tell stories with content from its social network.

Previously, when users wanted to publish a story with Tweets, it was necessary to manually manage a bunch of Tweet IDs and embed them into their app or website one at a time. Twitter has simplified that process, however, with its end-to-end ecosystem that enables users to leverage tools like TweetDeck, Curator, Spredfast, Dataminr, ScribbleLive, Wayin or Flowics to find and organize the Tweets they want into a single story.

"Great stories drive great audiences, and with your tweets organized using these new tools, you can display them on your own websites with Embedded Timelines on the web, and in your apps with TwitterKit on iOS and Android, in just a few lines of code. Just like Tweet embeds, the background and text colors are easily customizable, so your timelines blend perfectly into your app's design," Twitter said in its announcement.

In addition, Twitter unveiled a new "embedded grid" feature, which enables users to showcase stories in a more engaging way. The new, rich and responsive grid display can be leveraged to embed stories to any site or app. From the example Twitter gives in its blog, it seems as if this display works best with visual content, like videos and images. In fact, the social network notes that the new display gives users an engaging, immersive experience by highlighting multiple Tweets at once, with images and video displayed edge-to-edge.

Along with this new display option, Twitter is unveiling publish.twitter.com to make it even easier for users to embed Twitter content. According to the social network, the goal is to make this tool a "one stop shop" where you can preview all of the different types of displays offered in Twitter Kit and grab the embed code for any Twitter content a user wants to publish. To get started with the tool, users simply need to enter a Collection ID or URL for any story that they create and then publish.twitter.com will show a preview of the responsive grid and give a single line of embed code that can be used to publish the Tweets on a user's website or apps.