Debunking Twitter

Hi everyone! Keeping up with the theme of informing you all about what I’ve been learning in my class’s textbook, I will be writing this blog about the innerworkings of Twitter’s algorithm, format and how I feel about the usability of this form of social media. I had Twitter my senior year of high school to keep up with sports events in the high school I went to and my friends. I didn’t follow any businesses. I deleted it and recently redownloaded it 3 years later to see if anything had changed and it hadn’t too much.

According to the textbook, “Essentials of Social Media Marketing” the algorithm relies on ranking signals such as recency of the tweet, relevancy (involving keywords), engagement (likes, comments, retweets), the number of followers of the user and location relative to the specific user. Most tweets I’ve seen on my feed were from those I follow, from where my hometown is and those accounts that many people follow (like Elon Musk). Now that I’ve downloaded Twitter again, I’ve realized that the biggest change is the two tabs on the home screen. Those are the “for you” tab and the “following” tab. This is exactly how TikTok is formatted. I’ve noticed that most social media apps are very similar. They seem to be in competition with one another, each trying to have better features than the other. I’ve also noticed that people seem to not be tweeting as much as they used to. Popularity within the app seems to have died down, maybe due to the fact that TikTok has rose drastically in popularity.

After reading the textbook chapter, I found out that businesses when tweeting should keep retweeted content less than 20% and 30-40% as replies to customers and those who have commented. Clever responses are a must because Twitter is centered around humor and news. I sometimes look to Twitter for local news as well. Short tweets are also preferable, even though Twitter recently added the function to write whole paragraphs. Pictures are also used very often to keep content exciting and engaging.

In conclusion, Twitter is not one of my favorite apps to use. I like social media which centers mostly on pictures and videos (like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat). In addition, Twitter doesn’t seem to have changed too much since I had it in high school.