There have been some big movements in the last week or so regarding some of the big social media names. Even though some people aren’t happy about the changes, the two social networks in question; Twitter and Instagram, are finally understanding the need to get personal.

I have always said that social media is about understanding your target customer, and having a two-way conversation to find out what THEY want. Social media is giving you, as a business, what’s important to your customers; you just need to utilise it.

Who is Getting Personal?

Twitter

Twitter’s new timeline is here, and it’s algorithm is what everyone is talking about. This new algorithm that was introduced last month will feature tweets sorted based on their relevancy to a user, rather than chronology.

This new change is strictly opt-in and will need to be activated via your account settings, which means that you can make the decision whether you want to have your tweets ordered by relevancy, or chronologically. Don’t expect this to last for much longer though, as Twitter will make this a permanent fixture.

Twitter hasn’t yet said what determines which tweets are the ones “you’re most likely to care about”. They have said that they “look at accounts each user interacts with, and tweets they usually engage with as well as interest, and what’s going on in their network”.

Instagram

Instagram have announced this week that they will also be changing the way their platform displays posts. Photo’s will no longer be sorted in chronological order. The app will organise a news feed based on what’s most relevant to a user, instead of what’s most recent.  

Instagram said the following;

The order of photos and videos in your feed will be based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post. As we begin, we’re focusing on optimising the order — all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.

Instagram have said that an average users is missing close to 70% of feeds, meaning they are not seeing the photo’s that could be of most interest to them because of who long it takes to scroll through photos.

This change won’t decrease the amount of photo’s you see – they will all still be there, just in a more personalised, specific order.

With these changes coming from two of the biggest social networks it’s clear that understanding a customer and what they WANT, will dramatically increase chances of getting your business in front of them on social media.

How do you feel about the new updates?

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