14 DAY TRIAL // A few months back there was news that Twitter was testing a new feature that delivered public messages from people you were not following into your feed. Well, that feature is now on everyone’s dashboards.
Back in August, Twitter started surfacing tweets from people you were not following. The company explained at the time that this was a tactic that would not only bring new content to people’s feeds and perhaps help them discover new accounts to follow, but it would also fill up the empty space.
More specifically, you shouldn’t see these new tweets if someone on the list of people you follow has posted an update. Instead, you’ll only see them when your feed is empty and you keep hitting that refresh button, or pulling down on the feed, if you’re on your smartphone.
“One of our goals for experimentation is to continue improving your home timeline. After all, that’s the best way to keep up with everything happening in your world. Choosing who to follow is a great first step – in many cases, the best Tweets come from people you already know, or know of. But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy. To help you keep up with what’s happening, we’ve been testing ways to include these Tweets in your timeline — ones we think you’ll find interesting or entertaining,” Twitter’s Trevor O’Brien, director of product management writes in a blog post.
Always experimenting
The company reveals that it has recently run experiments that showed different types of content in the timeline, varying from recommended tweets, accounts, and topics. All the testing gave Twitter some great results, it seems, especially if they’re moving on to push the feature to everyone.
The company admits that they’ve noticed that most people enjoy seeing Tweets from accounts they may not follow, based on signals such as activity from accounts they do follow, the popularity of the tweets, and how people in their network interact with them.
“Some timeline experiments never made it to 100% of users. The ones that do aim to make the experience more interesting and relevant. As the timeline evolves, we will continue to show you Tweets you care about when they matter most,” O’Brien adds.
Twitter is always tinkering with one thing or another on the site, most often than not running limited tests that only affect a small portion of users.