Twitter has unveiled a major site redesign, the first in its four year history, as the social networking site seeks to make it easier for users to share images and video.

The move is designed to ensure people linger longer and return more often by splitting information over two ‘panes’ instead of one page.

One panel remains devoted to traditional tweets, the other directly embeds images and video, negating the need for users to navigate to another website to access the content.

Thus far deals have been struck with 16 content providers including YouTube and Flickr to share material.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams told the BBC: “We liked the old Twitter but we thought we could make it better. There was a lot buried underneath Twitter and now we are bringing all of that to the surface.”

The measures are primarily intended to boost the sites advertising revenues and follow the introduction of so called promoted tweets, whereby advertisers sponsor certain keyword searches.

The changes will be rolled out to users over the coming weeks.