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Twitter is Ready for its Golden Globes Close-up: Announces New Celeb-geared Apps

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Twitter is ready for its Golden Globes close-up.

The social media network has launched three celebrity-geared app features — Twitter Camera, Twitter Mirror Challenger and Twitter Q&A — and is promoting them for Sunday’s awards show, Mashable can exclusively reveal.

Though they’ve been quietly available for months, Twitter hasn’t announced them publicly until now. The new features are designed for stars who want to connect with fans, and is not available to all users just yet.

“In the past year there’s been a revolution around how people use Twitter, they are now integrating more pictures and videos to express themselves in ways they couldn’t before,” Kirstine Stewart, Twitter’s head of of North American media, told Mashable. “We thought it would be interesting to develop tools to use that form of expression.”

The additions underscore Twitter’s efforts to lure in more users. The social media platform currently has just over 300 million users — a point at which some analysts believe it has plateaued.

Twitter has already spent the last year undergoing a handful of product changes, such as getting rid of the 140 character limit for direct messages (and reportedly soon for actual tweets) and replacing favorite stars with hearts.

The platform has also expanded its alliance with Hollywood. For example, ABC branded its Shonda Rhimes Thursday night lineup of shows as “#TGIT” or “Thank God It’s Thursday,” which is used during the live tweeting of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder.

More recently, the fall 2015 TV season saw a rise in special Twitter hashtag emojis pegged to various shows and movies, including Fox’s popular music drama Empire and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Here’s a look at what stars can now do on the app:

Twitter Camera

This allows celebrities to have more of a “custom photo experience” by creating GIFs and videos and posting directly to Twitter.

Miley Cyrus used the feature during her hosting duties at the VMAs in August of 2015 and Andy Samberg, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jimmy Kimmel used it during the Emmys in September.

Twitter Q&A

This is a tool that Twitter describes as a “mini press junket.” It is an organized way for stars to answer questions from fans related to upcoming projects with special hashtags.

Recently, the feature has been used by Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller when they promoted their movie Burnt, by Seth Rogen when he promoted The Night Before and by the Star Wars cast for The Force Awakens.

Twitter Mirror Challenger

Twitter has been known to have a presence on red carpets and backstage at events ranging from premieres to awards shows. During these events, stars are often given the infamous Twitter mirror (pictured below) to take selfies of themselves by tapping the screen.

The third and final new feature is sort of a re-invention of the Twitter Mirror, this time designed to give fans the chance to challenge celebrities to do certain tasks. For example, at the 2015 Teen Choice Awards, celebrities were asked to do the Whip/Nae Nae.

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