Twitter Begins Prioritizing Tweets From Paying Profiles In Its Main ‘For You’ Feed

Twitter made a lot of people confused in the past few weeks with its decision to remove the classic Blue Legacy Tick feature.

Now, the company is making way for another rollout that entails prioritizing tweets from paying profiles across the main ‘For You’ feed.

Elon Musk and his team of executives are moving ahead with the subscription plan and despite the figures not witnessing the jump that they may have wanted or predicted, they’re making the most of it.

During the later hours of the evening yesterday, tech billionaire Elon Musk was seen speaking about how he was on a mission to prioritize tweets from those paying for the feature. In this way, it would be more obviously noticed on the For You feed.

Today, Twitter Blue members only make up a fraction of the user base (i.e.: less than 1 percent) of the app but we are expected to see so much more exposure in regards to the tweets in these apps.

For now, it does appear like it’s a problematic situation for obvious reasons. For starters, you are prioritizing those people who are paying over others. So for instance, that means saying hello to celebs and that makes your feed much less engaging.

People come to the app to witness the latest news and trends from accounts with big names and by limiting reach, the firm might not be making the best decision to build interest on this app.

As per research carried out by Pew Research in the year 2021, around 25% of app users put out 97% of such tweets and these underline how much reliance the platform puts on those who are most active on the platform in terms of engagement.

As per Twitter, things are looking pretty unbalanced right now and the leading 20% of users make up most of the tweets. Therefore, the company needs these top users to carry on making tweets. Thence to remove their ticks and de-prioritize the responses is a huge risk.

By increasing the number of members who pay, Twitter hopes to shift the balance in the right direction. And Musk and his executives feel this might be the right way forward, provided most people that pay are aligned with Musk’s ideology.

But we must remember how such actions do end up going against the trends we’ve seen across social media for years. This is the best way to move ahead in terms of app engagement.

For instance, in 2013, we saw the Facebook platform launch its own News Feed. The main objective here was to remove posts of low quality and fight against spam who tried to use the app to gain their own benefits including reach.

Despite receiving plenty of criticism, the News Feed proved to be effective in terms of enhancing user engagement. This way, social media apps were witnessed adopting a similar sorting so they could boost posts performing the best and suppress updates that were less engaging.


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