What the new Twitter timeline will mean for publishers and brands
Gonnie, Product Strategist at Nine Connections
Twitter announced a new home timeline: ‘Show me the best tweets first’. It will show you tweets you’re most likely to interact with, and it is meant to be used after you’ve been away for a while. Basically, it is an iteration — and hopefully an improvement — of the current ‘while you were away’. It is a setting you can turn on, allow you to see your best tweets at the top of your timeline and the rest of the tweets will appear in chronological order. Also, when you refresh the timeline, it will arrange the tweets in the way we are used to.
So how will this affect publishers and brands? These are our thoughts.
Choosing your timeline is a fixed setting
As this is a setting and not something that you can select in the home timeline itself yet, I expect that people won’t switch it off and on regularly. So I guess less active users will rely on the new algorithm to show them relevant tweets. This would be really good for Twitter, as it will attract more users. It will be easier to make sense of all the tweets which they normally would see as a total overload. And because you can always go back to the chronological timeline by refreshing, this could be a feature that will be used a lot by active users as well, as an extensive version of ‘while you were away’.
High quality content will have a longer lifetime
For brands, this new timeline will be a big chance to get more engagement and reach, as most of a brand’s content is quite timeless. Twitter claims that the timeline mostly will be filled with accounts that you interact most with, and that’s basically people. So also on Twitter, user shares are a growing opportunity. But you may also see tweets of accounts you don’t follow, selected based on popularity and how people in your network are interacting with it.
On Twitter, an average tweet gets 75% of its reach in less than 3 hours, making its half-time 4 times shorter than a Facebook post. The new timeline will make the active lifetime of a tweet much longer, if the content is relevant and engaging. Twitter is facing the same process Facebook has gone through to optimise the algorithm that pin-points the most relevant post. Let’s hope we won’t be facing the same sweepstakes and engagement-bait we’ve seen on Facebook a couple of years ago.
Less real time context
For publishers, it’s a bit more complex to predict what the new timeline will mean. When tweets about news, or even breaking news, are retracted from their real-time context, they could gain less interaction than in the chronological timeline. Twitter would have to take the velocity of interactions in account and show the tweets with a high velocity first, and leave the ones out that are remarkably slowing down.
When Twitter’s goal is to show evergreens at the top at the timeline, news publishers wouldn’t benefit right away. So let’s hope that the new timeline stays optional, as a timeline based on algorithms would cause news to break a lot slower. One thing is for sure, for news publishers to attract new followers, a thorough selection of engaging content could become even more important.
[insert a promotional message here about a certain tech start-up that uses artificial intelligence to predict the engagement of content ;)]
We’re really curious to see the first results and we’ll surely be testing a lot to find the factors that impact the new timeline’s algorithm. To strengthen our hypotheses, we would love to hear from you. What do you expect of the new Twitter home timeline? Let us know your thoughts.
