Now that was a little sneaky as Twitter rolled in a little “helpful” new feature that shows the ‘best‘ tweets first in your timeline.
The big issue is that we never knew about this change happening and most of you still don’t – the good news is that you can do something about it.
What exactly is a ‘best’ tweet?
Good question! – Well a machine, a computer programme with ‘god knows what criteria‘ is now generating an algorithm which is determining what these ‘best‘ tweets are and it is these that appear first in your feed.
This is a real pity as Twitter have now in their eternal wisdom decided that they should sacrifice the purity of their platform and copy what Facebook have done a long time ago – someone there must think this is good for users.
Unfortunately most of your posts on Facebook will never be seen by your followers and this change by Twitter will have the same effect.
For me the big issue with Twitter doing this is that you really don’t want to respond to a tweet that isn’t totally fresh – speed has been part of the magic of this great platform.
As I mentioned earlier you can shut this ‘show best tweets first‘ feature ‘off‘ by doing the following:
PC/Laptop
- Click on your ‘settings‘ tab (you will find this under your thumbnail on the top right corner)
- In the ‘account‘ menu scroll down to the ‘content‘ section and go to the ‘show me the best Tweets first‘ option
- Unclick this and you are in business!
Mobile device
- Go to your ‘home‘ page by clicking on the ‘Me‘ button
- Click on the little ‘wheel‘ symbol next to your thumbnail
- Click on ‘settings‘ and then click on the ‘timeline‘ option
- Unclick the ‘show me the best Tweets first‘ button (if you can’t see this option it means you have an old version of the APP and need to update)
I can’t see any good reason for leaving the ‘show me best Tweets first‘ feature on as I don’t trust it so I advise that you do the same. Let me know if you think otherwise.
Happy tweeting!
Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion
Fuzion offer Social Media Consultancy and Training from our offices in Dublin and Cork, Ireland
