Twitter Redesigns Homepage to Lure More Users

Twitter has redesigned its home page to encourage non-users to try the service.

 

Twitter Inc.

Twitter on Wednesday is giving its homepage a facelift to encourage visitors to try the service without logging in—possibly creating a new non-user audience that can still be served ads.

The new landing page will greet visitors with tiles of categories such as “Pop Artists,” “TV Shows & Stars,” “Business News,” and “Cute Animals,” a selection that reflects some of the best and most viral content on the platform. The idea of the new homepage is to bring a slice of those tweets to visitors instead of stonewalling them with the need to sign in.

According to a company blog post, after users click a topic, they will see a feed of tweets from popular accounts associated with that topic in real time. It’s almost as if they are logged in.

Until now, visitors who landed on Twitter.com only saw a brief welcome and a prompt to sign in, with the half a billion tweets sent each day swimming on the other side of the login page.

The homepage redesign comes after Twitter gave profile pages a facelift last year that highlighted images and gave users more creative authority. Twitter has said more than 200 million visitors come to Twitter profile pages each month.

The volume of visitors that have come to Twitter but then decide not to log in had been a conundrum for the company as it seeks to grow its user base beyond its 288 million users. Twitter has said that more than half a billion logged out users come to Twitter every month. Of those, over 125 million logged out users go directly to Twitter.com.

Now the company is working to capitalize on those masses in the hopes of serving them ads even if they aren’t full-fledged users. It plays into its grander strategy to build “the world’s largest daily audience” that doesn’t include just users in the traditional sense of the word but also groups like visitors who don’t sign in and those who see tweets in places other than Twitter itself.

The homepage redesign follows Twitter’s move last year to spiff up profile pages to highlight images and give users more creative authority. Twitter has said more than 200 million visitors come to Twitter profile pages each month.

Twitter said the new homepage will be rolled out first to U.S. desktop users.