Twitter, too, has begun experimenting with ways to recommend content within its user Feeds to show them more of what they might like, ideally keeping users active in the app for longer. This, as seen from Meta’s efforts, has achieved varying levels of success. But with TikTok fueling a whole new content shift, by focusing on AI-based recommendations and not on the social graph, every platform now sees the opportunity to lean into the same, highlighting their best posts to increase usage time.

We Recommend

Twitter is no exception. Twitter recently provided a new overview of how it adds recommended Tweets into user Feeds. Meanwhile, it’s also launching a new experiment to give users more control over such. As Twitter explains:

“If you’ve ever seen a Tweet you enjoyed from someone you didn’t follow, you’ve probably seen a recommendation. Think of them as personalized suggestions that are shown to you based on actions you take on Twitter.”

Twitter says that its recommendations – which can now be shown on your Home timeline, the Notifications tab, Topic Landing Pages, Explore, Spaces, and more – are displayed based on your various in-app actions.

Recommended Tweets are not as prominent as the current wave of AI recommendations on Facebook or Instagram, though Twitter did get ahead of the game, at least in some respects, by ramping up its Tweet recommendations back in 2017. Which people hated, which then forced Twitter to scale back. Since then, Twitter has been hesitant to go too hard on pushing its Tweet recommendations.

This, really, is because Twitter’s recommendation algorithms just aren’t that great. Granted, some recommendations are interesting and can enhance the Tweet experience, but more often than not, Twitter’s ‘What’s Happening’ trends are only vaguely relevant, and even sometimes straight offensive. A lot of the time, Twitter seems to just be throwing stuff at you in hopes that you’ll catch some of it. It doesn’t seem like there’s a heap of focus here and the same extends to Spaces, with the Spaces tab often being a mess of random discussions happening at any given time, with very little personalization or relevance. But really, like TikTok, Twitter shouldn’t have to ask you for explicit input and should be able to infer greater relevance based on your in-app activity, which it continues to struggle with.

The Wrap

Twitter is still mainly developing its processes, with its latest experiment being a new ‘X’ button on recommended Tweets, making it easier to remove them from your home timeline and share your feedback. This is helpful, but again, TikTok’s allure in this sense is its capacity to ‘learn’ user viewing preferences in real-time. Twitter should be doing better on this element given its Explore page, but even that’s not personalized enough to maximize engagement. Maybe through these manual inputs, it can still improve, but the fact that Twitter is trailing remains.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3UwXv8J