Social Media Marketing

Twitter is officially rolling out autoplay video in a user’s timeline, taking on its biggest competitor Facebook. But you'll be able to switch it off.

Twitter has followed in the footsteps of Facebook with the introduction of autoplaying video. 

In a move that is no doubt music to advertisers' ears, videos, GIFs and Vines will now play automatically, albeit silently, as you scroll through your Twitter timeline.

Twitter said in a blog post: "Today it's become even easier to enjoy video on Twitter. Now native videos, Vines and GIFs will begin to play back automatically. So you can keep up with the action without missing a tweet and get a better sense of what’s been shared instantly."

If you see a video that tickles your fancy, you can tap it or flip your phone sideways to activate sound and make the video window bigger.

As might be expected, the news hasn't gone down well with some Twitter users, who have - you guessed it - tweeted their dismay.   

However, maybe these users should have read Twitter's full post before whingeing about the move, as the company has said that autoplaying videos can be switched off easily. 

Twitter explained: "Remember, you have ultimate control through your settings. You can choose to revert to the previous click-to-play experience all the time or simply have videos autoplay only when you're connected to WiFi.

"If you're somewhere with high data rates or you have low bandwidth on your device, we’ll opt you out of autoplay to avoid unexpected charges or slow performance, (Read more...) you’ll continue to see videos as click-to-play."

Autoplaying videos will show on Twitter for iOS and twitter.com from today, and will arrive on Android in the coming weeks.

Twitter's autoplay video feature comes after Facebook announced autoplaying adverts in 2013 which users cannot disable

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

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