Twitter wants to become your go-to source for news

By Margaret Boland & Mark Hoelzel

To increase the number of users who visit the site for news content, Twitter released a new feature this week that highlights tweets from news publishers, TechCrunch reports. The feature replaces URL links with a card-like format that displays brief summaries of stories and an enhanced image.

Many users already flock to the digital media platform site for news: 63% of Twitter users receive their news from the social media site, up from 52% in 2013, according to new data published by Pew Research Center. The added visual attention to publishers' tweets hopes to attract users to news articles and ultimately drive them to publishers' sites.

News publishers will benefit from the new publisher tweet format in two essential ways:

First, publishers could decrease their reliance on Facebook for referral traffic. At the end of 2014, Facebook accounted for a quarter of all referral traffic for publishers, while Twitter tacked on less than a percentage point, according to data by Shareaholic. As Facebook's evolving article formats, including 'Instant Articles,' threaten to take ad revenue away from publishers, an additional media source with heavy referral traffic will benefit publishers.
Plus, the new format will be effortless to adapt. The new format simply enhances images already present in the tweet to give the reader more article context without additional multimedia or style redesigns. This allows publishers to focus on content and not worry about aligning formats.