Let’s say you’re an average Twitter user named Bill.
Twitter makes money when it shows you ads. The more ads you watch, the more money Twitter makes. It’s trying to get you to spend as much time on the app, so that you watch more ads.
The algorithm’s job is to show you content that will make you spend more time on the app.
To show you content that’ll make you spend more time on the app, it tries to guess:
“What type of content is Bill most likely to engage with?”
“What is trending among users that have similar tastes as Bill?”
The Algorithm is basically Twitter’s way of making an educated guess about these questions. It does so in 3 steps:
It guesses which 1500 tweets you will most like from the 100 million tweets on the platform.
It gives each tweet an ‘engagement probability score’ and ranks them from best to worst. The top tweets are the ones you’ll most likely engage with.
It cleans up the tweet list by removing misinformation, blocked accounts etc. shows you the tweets with the highest score first, and throws in an ad for every 2-3 tweets.
After going through these 3 steps, what Twitter shows you is called the Twitter Feed.
Understanding how it picks, ranks, and filters tweets can help you write content reaching millions of people.
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We want to understand how the algorithm finds relevant tweets, ranks them and what it filters out. The technical terms for these steps are: