With its recent introduction of native video, Twitter is getting increasingly visual. The platform that was once famous for the sparseness of its 140-character posts is evolving into a multimedia powerhouse.
If you want your tweets to stand out, including images is a surefire way to boost engagement. While it's simple to share your own photos and video on the service, you might have trouble finding the right image to accompany links.
Below, we take a look at free tool TwitShot, which helps you "spice up" your tweets with images. TwitShot extracts images from links and attaches them to your tweets, giving you a better shot at engagement.
Tweet links with images from the web.
While some estimate adding an image to a tweet can boost engagement by up to 150%, Twitter itself revealed in a 2014 blog post that photos gain users an average of a 35% boost in retweets alone.
To add images to tweets containing links, you can use TwitShot. Simply link your Twitter account, type your tweet in the text box and images from the link's content will load below the text.
If there are multiple images, you can select which you'd like to use from the options that appear on the site.
Alternatively, Chrome users can get the TwitShot extension that adds a button to your browser to tweet from the page you're on, using an image extracted from the page. Your final tweet will simply have an image attached -- you can choose whether or not to add the "via TwitShot" credit.
Tweets links with images from iOS.
TwitShot also offers a free iOS app. Once you've installed the app, when you want to share a link on Twitter, simply tap on the share icon in the bottom-center of your Safari window, then select the three dots "more" icon and then toggle TwitShot to "On." TwitShot will now appear as a sharing option, as per the GIF below.
You can also open the TwitShot app to type or paste text into the text box and choose from the image options that appear.