Twitter Tells You Who to Follow

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Written by Robert Rios | 14 December 2010

Twitter is updating the design of its social structure. If you have noticed either the "People" or "Find People" links at the top of your front page, you may have already discovered the new features. Twitter is becoming a recommendation site, adding the functionality of an interest graph to its already impressive range. Twitter has recently stated its purpose to improve even further upon the communication phenomenon it began as a super-fast network known as the Twitterverse.

If you click through the new tab, you come to a page that recommends people to follow.

Like Facebook, which recommends services based on the information you give it as part of your introductory profile, Twitter recommends people and businesses to follow based on the similarity of your tweets. You are also given the profiles of friends of friends, like a true social media site.

The blogosphere has already assigned a vocabulary to this phenomenon; a contextual network based on shared interests is called a nichework. The things we focus on and tweet about that connect us are called our attention streams. These are sure to be the tools that will affect marketing in the future, as the algorithms which predict actions based on real-time, interest-gathering behavior become more and more accurate. Computers will soon have enough data and be smart enough to predict behavior.

The way this will affect business cannot be understated. Businesses can benefit greatly from finding and studying their nicheverses and the attention streams of their customer base. Say goodbye to all the expensive demographic and psychographic research that was once only available to large corporations able to outsource to other large corporations. Every business now has access to the inner thoughts of their target market, and an automatic referral system.

If your business is important enough to a certain group, Twitter will show your profile automatically to that nicheverse. If you want to break into a certain demographic, you can easily view their tweets and behaviors, and modify your marketing strategy to fit their attention stream.

As social networks compete to stay on top, features such as these begun by Twitter will undoubtedly be redesigned and improved by other networks. Businesses would do best to stay on top of these changes, if only because they will be saving themselves a lot of work.

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