Today, Todd Wasserman wrote a post upon Twitter's news of launching its new branding pages.  The news ushers more online marketing and branding opportunities for businesses seeking to broaden consumer awareness regarding products, services, and company brands.

The free options aligned with the brand pages allow companies to customize accounts with headers (comparable to those aligned with display banner ads), allowing for conspicuous taglines and fonts, making a company's brand more prominent than previously-allocated under Twitter's current design.  Additionally, companies may choose to keep particular tweets atop of timelines.  These tweets auto-expand, revealing embedded photos or videos, creating more marketing and branding options, without needed actions from on-page browsers.

Furthermore, the brand pages segment a company's "@" replies and "mentions."  As mentioned in an Ad Age Digital post, this particular function will serve customer-service-oriented companies well, enabling them to respond to customers without having to sift through other past Twitter activities.

Twitter's new brand pages should be a welcomed online marketing tool for brands struggling to make social media connections with a meager 140 characters.  Now, companies can offer more information, create more associations, and engage in more branding initiatives using Twitter.

The new launch involves 21, specific companies including Verizon, Dell, Nike, McDonalds, and other familiar brands, all forging ongoing dialogues with Twitter regarding the new move.

It will be interesting to track the movement and social embrace of the 21 brands as Twitter launches its brand pages.  The move couldn't have come at a better time for the platform, as social site competitors, such as Google+ (also issuing brand pages), undergo modifications to emulate the multiple options afforded to a site offering such multi-media opportunities as Facebook (a site that received more traffic than Google last year!)