Usually, Twitter gives its users automatic suggestions on what account to follow to give them a chance to expand reach or enjoy the social networking platform.
Twitter's "Who To Follow" feature gives suggestions based on what accounts the user follows or interacts with. Through this, Twitter recommends to users other accounts that the platform thinks they might enjoy or need, based on their activity.
Twitter also based its account suggestions on the users' address book contact, if they opted to upload them, and patterns from their following history. Twitter also takes into consideration the user's location, including city or country, and their activities on the social media platform. The suggestions are produced through algorithms, so there might be a chance that a user doesn't know the account or find them important.
Twitter Gives Suggestions On What Accounts To Unfollow
Recently, Twitter briefly rolled out a feature to selected users, where it gives suggestions on what account they might want to unfollow. The feature was first noticed by Matt Navarra of The Next Web. Navarra shared some screenshots of Twitter's suggestions on who to unfollow to improve his timeline.
Also, Tim Fernholz of Quartz claimed he received some unfollow suggestions from Twitter. He posted a screenshot of the Twitter's suggestion, telling him that he doesn't need to follow everyone to know what's happening. The test was later confirmed by Twitter to Will Oremus of Slate. In a statement, Twitter told Oremus that it is aware that people want relevant a Twitter timeline.
"One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don't engage with regularly. We ran an incredibly limited test to surface accounts that people were not engaging with to check if they'd like to unfollow them," a Twitter representative told Oremus.
Twitter Mum On Test's Results
Oremus reported that Twitter rolled out the test for a few days, involving a small fraction of users. The spokesperson said that the test is over, but refused to comment on its success or what new features will emerge from it.
However, Oremus stressed that Twitter informed him that the test wasn't meant to pass judgment on anyone's account, but was simply intended to bring to the users' attention some accounts that they haven't interacted with in the past and might want to unfollow to clean up their timeline.
Oremus also believes that the test could be a part of Twitter's efforts to boost engagement and strengthen user satisfaction. In the past years, Twitter has successfully improved its engagement metrics by implementing timeline ranking algorithm and "In Case You Missed It" features that received warmly by users.
