Twitter Launches New Timeline Featuring Top Past Tweets

Twitter launched its hotly rumored new timeline on Wednesday that has had users nervous that live Twitter will become a thing of the past. With the new timeline “We want to make it even easier and faster for people to discover and catch up on what’s happening right now,” Twitter announced in a blog post today. […]

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Twitter launched its hotly rumored new timeline on Wednesday that has had users nervous that live Twitter will become a thing of the past.

With the new timeline “We want to make it even easier and faster for people to discover and catch up on what’s happening right now,” Twitter announced in a blog post today.

Users will be prompted to opt-in to the new timeline, which is purely optional at this point. A selection of past Tweets from accounts users follow will appear at the top of the timeline, followed by the traditional chronologically-ordered live Tweet stream. The Tweets that get surfaced at the top of the new timeline will be “recent and relevant”.

“We’ve improved the timeline by analyzing how millions of people engage with billions of Tweets — and we’re using this information to determine the best content to surface. We use a person’s past Twitter activity to predict which Tweets they might like to see most,” explained the post.

The company says it has seen significantly better engagement in testing the new timeline and believes it will help attract and keep new users as well as benefit brands by giving branded organic Tweets more opportunities to connect with followers.

Twitter releases its fourth-quarter earnings performance after the market closes today, and we can expect CEO Jack Dorsey to talk more about this change.

For more details on the timeline, see our FAQ: All About How The New Twitter Timeline Works. Also, What Twitter’s New Timeline Means For Brands And Advertisers.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was formerly Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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