What the new Twitter timeline means for brands

Twitter recently announced a new home timeline that will show you tweets you’re most likely to interact with. It is meant to be used after you’ve been away. It is an iteration, and, one hopes, an improvement of the current “while you were away.” It is a setting you can turn on. It lets you see your best tweets at the top of your timeline; the rest will appear in chronological order. When you refresh the timeline, it will arrange the tweets in the way we are used to.

Here’s how this will affect publishers and brands:

Choosing your timeline is a fixed setting

As this is a setting and not something that you can select in the home timeline itself, 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 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