Twitter Inc (TWTR) Shares Up After Introducing an Improved Timeline

Twitter building

Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) launched an improved timeline for consumer and brands, a critical decision that allows people to find tweets that are important to them easily and quickly.

The microblogging company decided to customize a user’s homepage or timeline based on their favorites—the athletes, brands, celebrities, politicians or organizations they are following.

The stock price of Twitter was up 5% to $15.14 per share at the time of this writing around 1:11 in the afternoon in New York.

Twitter wants the best content to shine on the timeline

According to the company, the tweets that are mostly important to users will appear at the top of their timeline and the rest of the tweets that are likely to be less important to them will be displayed in a reverse chronological order.  Users can turn on their improved timeline in their setting for Android, iOS, and web.

In a blog post, Eric Farkas, product marketing manager at Twitter, wrote, “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.

Brands can reach a more engaged audience

Farkas said the brands performing well on Twitter are those creating quality content. According to him, the best content will shine on the platform whether it comes from a consumers, large brand or SMB.

“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,” he said.

Twitter also noted an increase in users’ engagement on organic tweets from brands and tweet about live events during the duration of the company’s experiments.

Farkas said the change in the timeline does not affect Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. Brand will continue to have access to the same suite of creative, measurement, and targeting tools to ensure that their ads display to the right people at the moment.

George Manas, chief strategy officer at Resolution Media, commented, “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.”