Twitter has been working on its health, diverting resources from product development to “drive healthy conversation” on the platform instead.
A lot of articles critiquing or questioning this approach went up last Friday when they reported their latest earnings, but we wanted to focus more on the thread from their product lead Kayvon Beykpour:
We’ve heard questions from some of you relating to our work to drive healthy conversation on Twitter. People are asking us 1) about the breadth and precision of our work & 2) the impact of our work on the Search experience. We wanted to address these questions transparently here.
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018
The concerns Beykpour are addressing are largely around “shadowbanning”, or removing an account’s content from search results so it’s only visible to the account themselves.
The platform has been accused of shadowbanning based on political beliefs, but is clear that it’s based on behavior signals from account activity:
To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets. We recently publicly testified to Congress on this topic https://t.co/Zk4DL7Q3hq
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018
So what does this mean from a brand standpoint? If you’re following the rules of regular engagement on Twitter- as most brands are- you don’t have anything to worry about.
The behavior signals Twitter is looking out for are spam-like behaviors: Following a large number of accounts in rapid succession, sending the same tweet over and over (some users have accidentally triggered this trying to get more entries into a contest, for example), or anything else that seems like automated, suspicious behavior.
If your Twitter strategy is like that of most brands working to build an authentic community of fans, followers and customers, you have nothing to worry about.
In the long run this is a good move for Twitter- and for your brand on Twitter- for several reasons:
- Any new users they’re attracting will be real people and not bots; real people follow and buy things from brands and bots do not
- Current Twitter users will have more reason to use the platform more often and for longer periods of time, giving them a greater chance to run across your brand either organically or via paid advertising
- Past users have a greater incentive to return to the platform if they feel it has changed for the better
Overall a healthier environment on Twitter is better in the long run for all Twitter users, and brands will experience benefits of a happier and healthier conversational environment.
Agree or disagree with us on Twitter health and want to talk about it? Find us- you guessed it- on Twitter @UnionMetrics.