Understanding the social media algorithms is important to social media marketers, especially since it can heavily impact a brand’s reach on social media. We’ve talked about the Facebook News Feed algorithm and the Instagram Feed algorithm. This time, we would love to dive into the Twitter timeline algorithm.
Up until 2015, the Twitter timeline displays tweets in the reverse-chronological order. In an attempt to improve the Twitter experience, the team at Twitter has gradually introduced changes to how they show tweets on the timeline.
In this post, you’ll learn how the Twitter timeline algorithm works and six ways to increase your reach on Twitter in 2018.
How does the Twitter timeline algorithm work?
Before we dive into the specifics, it might be helpful to know that the Twitter timeline algorithm is constantly changing.
Twitter runs dozens of tests with its timeline every month. In fact, Deepak Rao, the product manager of the Twitter timeline, said, “Our algorithm changes on an almost daily to weekly basis”. As the Twitter timeline algorithm has helped to increase Twitter’s key metrics, it’s likely that Twitter will continue to test new ideas with its timeline1.
But here’s a piece of good news: Twitter would probably not use a fully-algorithmic timeline, unlike the Facebook News Feed or Instagram feed. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, had said that Twitter will remain live and real-time2.
Okay, let’s get into the algorithm.
The Twitter timeline algorithm
The Twitter timeline consists of three main sections:
- Ranked tweets
- “In case you missed it”
- Remaining tweets in reverse-chronological order
Every time you open the Twitter app or visit twitter.com, the algorithm will study all the tweets from accounts you follow and give each of them a relevance score based on several factors. According to Twitter and Rao, here are some of the factors3:
- The tweet itself: its recency, presence of media cards (image or video), and overall engagement (including retweets, clicks, favorites, and time spent reading it)
- The tweet’s author: your past interactions with this author, the strength of your connection to them, and the origin of your relationship
- You: tweets you found engaging in the past, how often and how heavily you use Twitter
Then, Twitter will put the tweets that it thinks would be engaging to you in the first two sections — ranked tweets and “In case you missed it”.
The intent is to let you see the best Tweets at a glance first before delving into the lengthier time-ordered sections.
Ranked tweets
This section will appear at the top of your timeline and isn’t distinctly different from the regular timeline on first glance. But it contains only tweets that Twitter thinks are relevant to you. According to Twitter, the selected tweets should still be ordered reverse-chronologically4. (But from my personal experience, they might not be.)
For example, in the screenshot above, the tweets were from several hours ago (when I took the screenshot). I believe this is what the algorithm did:
- It calculated that these are the tweets I might most likely be interested in,
- pulled them out from all the tweets on my timeline, and
- placed them at the top of my timeline.
Even though there were many tweets in between these tweets, the algorithm decided that these are more relevant to me than the rest. So it ranked them at the top of my timeline.
I found that these selected tweets were often liked or commented on by the accounts I follow. I believe the assumption is that if the accounts I follow interacted with these tweets, I would likely interact with them, too.
“In case you missed it”
This section does as its name suggests. It shows you tweets that you might be interested in but might not see in the old timeline as they were from quite some time ago.
This module seems to only appear in your timeline when you have been away from Twitter for several hours or days5. Similar to the ranked tweets section, this section contains tweets that Twitter thinks are relevant to you. But the selected tweets are ordered according to their relevance score and might be from many hours or days ago.
For example, as you can see in the example above, the tweets were not ordered reverse-chronologically. They were also from more than 10 hours ago — which I might not have seen if I were just scrolling through a reverse-chronological timeline.
Remaining tweets
After the two sections, you’ll see the rest of the tweets from accounts you follow in the original reverse-chronological order. Just like the old Twitter timeline.
In this section (and sometimes in the two above), you’ll also find retweets, promoted tweets, and suggested accounts to follow. You might even see tweets from accounts you don’t follow. These are often tweets that Twitter thinks will make your timeline more relevant and interesting.
According to Twitter, you might also see “events featured at the top of your timeline labeled as Happening now” in the mobile app6.
Do all these match your experience with the Twitter timeline? If not, it’ll be great to hear from you in the comments section below!
How to increase your reach on Twitter in 2018
Just like the Facebook News Feed algorithm and Instagram feed algorithm, engagement seems to be a major factor in the Twitter timeline algorithm. When your tweets receive many interactions, they would be ranked at the top of your followers’ timeline and, sometimes, even shown to people who aren’t following you.
This is a great benefit of the Twitter timeline algorithm — a ripple effect.
“It has also ensured that the most popular tweets are far more widely seen than they used to be, enabling them to go viral on an unprecedented…
