Tweets are expanding their content by web previews in order to deliver people a more interactive experience.

Twitter is expanding its Tweets this week! From now on, they will enable followers to easily discover and access content from the web. Until now, you could have expanded Tweets to view videos or photos but now you can also access web content previews directly from the stream. At the moment it seems to be available only for partner websites and from the look at the list, it´s a feature dedicated to media accounts. You can view expanded Tweets for the Wall Street Journal, Breaking News, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle etc.

Wall Street Journal´s Expanded Tweet

We followed the Wall Street Journal on Twitter to see how it works. When the Tweet contains a link to an article on its website, you will see the View Summary option instead of Expand. The summary will provide you with the article´s preview, sometimes even Twitter accounts of the publishers and writers. And when you click anywhere on the preview, you will get navigated to the article on the website. The number of retweets and favorites will appear as before. You can continue to read the article, follow these accounts, reply, favorite or retweet the Tweet just as you are used to.

You can even watch moments from your favorite television shows from partners like Lifetime and Dailymotion.

Or view exclusive photos from sources like BuzzFeed and TMZ.

The new expanded Tweets are available to everyone on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com and should be available to Twitter for iPhone and Android in the near future.

Twitter´s step proves that interactive multimedia content is absolutely necessary in the world of social media. Could this be a reaction to Facebook´s in­troduction of Timeline and the new photo layout? It will definitely be interesting to measure and compare the Engagement Rates of involved media before and after the content expansion. Will access to article previews make followers engage more with the tweets? Stay tuned with Socialbakers!

P.S.: Don´t forget to save the date for the upcoming Engage 2012 event taking place October 23rd in New York City! Find out more here.