Twitter’s testing a feature that suggests videos to accompany your hashtags

Yep, Twitter’s trying something new… again. The social media site appears to be testing a new video sharing feature, which automatically generates a list of videos which you could include in your next tweet.

The feature was spotted by the folks over at Re/code, and seems to only be active in the company’s iOS app at present. Basically, when you compose a tweet using certain relevant tags (like #AMillionWays for new comedy film ‘A Million Ways to Die in the West’) the app will present you with relevant video clips you may like to include in your post. In Re/Code’s test, the app suggested including trailers for the movie, which were provided by the film’s official Twitter account.

While Twitter tests new features all the time (and there’s no guarantee this feature will be released to the general public on a wider scale), the feature is an interesting potential move in Twitter’s quest to dominate the social media space.

The company has been rolling out a number of new features recently, including automatically-expanding photo links, the ability to share multiple photos and tag users, as well as a redesigned website.

Many of the changes make the site more visually attractive and familiar to new users, which fits with the objectives the company has set around user growth. This new feature could be part of that, potentially giving users an easy way to share multimedia, and their followers more stimulating content in their timeline.

Although the feature suggests the video is ‘provided’ by a particular Twitter account (not the usual ‘promoted’ text that denotes an advert), this could also be a new revenue stream for Twitter, allowing advertisers a new way to share their videos with an audience which may already be interested enough in the topic to be tweeting about it.