Twitter as a network is different than Facebook in the fact that the updates are mostly happening in real time. While Twitter does have features to help user views for tweets that occurred in the past, users will still see many tweets in real time.
The overall Twitter algorithm is continually changing – sometimes daily or weekly. While it may seem almost impossible to keep up with, there is a rhyme and reason to the changes.
The general order of tweets you will see on your feed is as follows:
- Popular or ranked tweets from users you follow
- “In case you missed it” tweets
- Real-time tweets
The first two groups are determined by a relevancy score that is determined by characteristics of the tweet: its engagement, your relationship to the poster, and how you use Twitter in general.
If you are looking to improve your reach, there still are a few things you can do now with the knowledge of how the feed functions. Dive into your Twitter Analytics and learn which tweets are gaining the most engagement. On Twitter, it is common to reuse your top tweets. By sharing these again, you are expanding the reach of the tweet’s audience and hopefully improving its engagement.
It’s important to dive into the analytics to view this information. Sometimes your top tweets may not be garnering any likes or retweets, but people are clicking on the external links shared within them. If you are not tracking this, you may be misidentifying the ones that are most prevalent.
As you get in the habit of reviewing your analytics, be sure to continue to rotate new content into your feed so that your followers are not only receiving recycled content. Also, play with posting times. Your audience may be more active during one time of the day over another. If you are only posting when they are offline, then you may be losing opportunities to reach them, especially if you are not receiving a high enough relevancy score.