An improved timeline for consumers and brands

Every day, millions of people come to Twitter to discover information about the topics they’re most passionate about — but we know that it can be easy to miss the best Tweets from people you follow because there’s so much happening on the platform.

We want to make it even easier and faster for people to discover and catch up on what’s happening right now. Today, we’re launching an improved timeline to help people see Tweets that are important to them — from their favorite athletes, musicians, politicians, or brands. Upon opening Twitter, the Tweets they’re most likely to care about from the accounts they follow will appear at the top of the timeline. The rest of the Tweets will then be displayed directly underneath in reverse chronological order, like always. People can choose to turn this option on in their settings for iOS, Android, and web.

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. We look at accounts they interact with, Tweets they usually engage with, interests, and what’s going on in their network.

What this means for brands
Brands that create quality content have always performed well on Twitter. With this update,
whether it comes from an SMB, large brand, consumer, or athlete you follow, the best content shines through. We’ve noticed in our early experiments that people who have this experience turned on Tweet and Retweet more on Twitter — and we believe this means that brands can reach a more engaged potential audience. Throughout our tests, we also saw an increase in engagement for brands’ organic Tweets and an increase in engagement for Tweets about live events.

Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts will work the same way as always, and are not affected by this change. Brands will still have access to the same suite of creative, measurement, and targeting tools to make sure theirs ads display to the right people, at just the right moment.

This update is a clear way to draw out the most relevant content on an individual basis while maintaining Twitter’s core strength of being live. We’re incredibly excited by the opportunity this presents for all the brands we partner with.

George ManasChief Strategy Officer, Resolution Media

This upcoming change seems to be beneficial for both consumers and marketers as the best content — including organic branded content — rises to the top, increasing both relevance and likelihood of engagement. We’re hoping this will also drive more users to Twitter more often, which will in turn be good news for marketers. It’s clear Twitter has listened to its consumers and its partners, and we’re excited to get deeper under the hood to evaluate implications for our clients.

Sarah HofstetterCEO, 360i 

This is exciting. With the best content being bubbled up, you’ve got a meaningful evolution of user experience. It also gives creators, brands and publishers that produce great content an opportunity to engage more of their followers. As a user and advertiser, I’m psyched.

Jason SteinFounder & CEO, Laundry Service

Learn more
We’ve developed a set of best practices to help you create a powerful content strategy on Twitter. To learn more about the new timeline experience, visit our Help Center or contact your account team.