Some marketers might freak out a little about the news that Twitter bought Summify, the little content prioritization tool that works hand in hand with Twitter, Facebook, and your RSS feeds. The duty of Summify is to read all of your RSS and social media feeds for you, and then tell you (through email) which ones are most relevant to you based on the number of retweets/shares/favorites/likes a post/tweet/feed gets.
Basically it says, “oh hey, everybody likes this post so you will too”. Additionally, it pays attention to the types of things that you click, “like” and share and takes that into account.
However, here’s the statement from Summify that’s likely to freak people out now that Twitter has gotten ahold of the algorithm:
“The nature of social media is such that even the most devoted users miss more than half of what comes at them, so we established the idea that you can’t and shouldn’t read everything – read just the good stuff! It stands to reason that the good stuff is usually what your friends and your sources are talking about the most.”
So in other words, marketers and content creators are freaking out a little bit because they’re expecting a Twitter update that will filter or even remove the content that they’re posting from their followers’ feeds. However, it seems that not so long ago, our friend Facebook implemented a similar algorithm change, and to be perfectly honest, we haven’t seen a drastic change. In many cases, especially for larger publishers, there has been a dramatic change for the better.
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If Twitter were to build this priority feed into their algorithm (as they probably will), if you have any kind of large following that re-tweets, comments on, and likes your articles in abundance, expect your exposure to be heightened. And if you don’t, you probably have a little bit of time before Twitter gets the ball rolling. That means it’s time to roll up your sleeves and build a more active community.
With that said, Twitter has always been fairly passive aggressive and honest with the changes they’ve made. Sure, they started offering sponsored tweets to paid advertisers, but the tweets don’t take up much room and are clearly colored and labeled as so. Twitter isn’t known for being very intrusive about anything they do, really. With an update like this, I can see something more along the lines of highlighted tweets at the top of your feed, or even a separate “popular tweets” feed all together.
Additionally, I like Jon Mitchell from ReadWriteWeb‘s stance on it:
“Discovery is Twitter’s key problem to solve. If it wants users to stick around, it needs to help them learn to find the things that interest them. That’s what Summify’s core technology does.”
So perhaps Twitter doesn’t intend to restructure the way they’re filtering content at all. Perhaps the acquisition of Summify is simply a move for implementing better content discovery.
What are your thoughts? Will Twitter use Summify for good, or for evil?
