New Twitter profile pages likely to attract more lawyers to Twitter

If you thought managing changes at LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ was hard enough, get ready for possible changes at Twitter.

As reported yesterday by Mashable’s Samantha Murphy (@heysmantha), Twitter is testing a major profile redesign that’s very reminiscent of Facebook and Google+.

Twitter tests changes with select users before rolling them out to all users.

From Mashable assistant features editor Matt Petronzio’s test profile, depicted above, you can see a number of changes.

• Your picture and bio is moved to the left leaving more room for profile info (think Google+) and significantly more room for your banner image (maybe logo/signage for firms).
• Rather than a column of text tweets, the focus is on photos and content cards. Think media (image, text, or video) delivered in visually pleasing tiles.
• As one clicks on favorites, lists, followers, or following, the tiles would change out accordingly.
• An option for the stream to show “Tweets” and “Tweets and replies” for every user — a feature typically reserved for verified users (those with a blue check mark).

Such changes would likely attract more lawyers for at least couple reasons.

A visual ‘media presence’ could make Twitter more intuitive to use. While I regularly hear “I don’t get Twitter,” I don’t hear the same as to Facebook and Google+. I am not saying all lawyers see value in using the latter two, I’m just saying lawyers can understand how to use them.

Look at LexBlog’s LexTweet displaying the Tweets of over 1,000 of the 8,000 lawyers on the LXBN Network who use Twitter. This visual depiction of tweets piques a viewer’s interests.

Secondly, a cleaner profile area with more biographical info would would appear more worthwhile and business-like to lawyers. I am not seeing increased bio info on this test profile, but Facebook and Google+ have expanded profiles, including contact information. Expect Twitter to head this way.

Lawyers tend to be lemmings, get a large number of lawyers using something, other lawyers will follow. Twitter changes like this are apt to attract more lawyers to Twitter