Twitter shares info about their updated Algorithm

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, we have consistently learned more about what make the social outlet work and more importantly, what they presented to their audience.

Today, the outlet took another step by sharing some info about what causes you to see a tweet and what is presented in your feed, especially the "for you" tab.

There is a great press release going into greater details about the algorithm, but really - there are 2 questions they ask each account - 
“What is the probability you will interact with another user in the future?” or, “What are the communities on Twitter and what are trending Tweets within them?”

The recommendation pipeline is made up of three main stages that consume these features: 

1. Fetch the best Tweets from different recommendation sources in a process called candidate sourcing.
2. Rank each Tweet using a machine learning model.
3. Apply heuristics and filters, such as filtering out Tweets from users you’ve blocked, NSFW content, and Tweets you’ve already seen.

​The release goes into great, great detail about what shows up in your feed, your "for you" tab and what tweets are pushed towards the top of your feed - including the details around home mixer and product mixer.

Home Mixer is built on Product Mixer, our custom Scala framework that facilitates building feeds of content. This service acts as the software backbone that connects different candidate sources, scoring functions, heuristics, and filters.

Candidate sources is where Twitter starts to find tweets you would be interested in.  

They search the best 1500 Tweets from a pool of hundreds of millions through these sources. We find candidates from people you follow (In-Network) and from people you don’t follow (Out-of-Network). Today, the For You timeline consists of 50% In-Network Tweets and 50% Out-of-Network Tweets on average, though this may vary from user to user.

In-Network is the biggest grouping, showing off tweets that your network engaged with, which Out-of-Network are those you do not follow.

The article gets into SimClusters and all kinds of other things that go into how a tweet shows up in your "for you" tab.
But at the end of the day, it is quite simple - you will see tweets from those that you follow, those that they have interacted with, trending topics which you engage with most frequently and filers/blocked accounts, etc...

Overall, the "for you" tab can be great, but also awful.  You see some really good stuff, some really random stuff...but I just don't really look there that frequently.
The big question for businesses is - how do I show up there?

Be active, engage your followers and non-followers, be part of your community and industry.

Overall, the updates to Twitter have been interesting.  We will see how it all shapes out, bc right now "for you" is getting some negative feedback.  People want to see who they follow and they don't like change.
This release sheds some light on the how and why, but it really doesn't do much in regards to how we will change as we use the app.

Stuck and need social help?  Always here to help...send me an email and let's chat!
C Emsweller