Twitter really does seem to deprioritise Tweets with links in, I am testing a ‘plan B’ :)

A while ago the idea that links in Tweets resulted in that Tweet being deprioritised (deboosted) did the rounds and several Marketing Twitter people suggested that a text-only Tweet is followed by a second Tweet with a link in.

I probably tried it once or twice then forgot (and didn’t really take it that seriously), and I have continued to include links in many of my Tweets.

I’ve just read an interesting and disheartening thread from @aakashg0 who, along with others, has peered into the code Twitter recently published, and confirmed that almost everything I do on Twitter is wrong 😉

Twitter revealed its algorithm to the world.

But what does it mean for you?

I spent the evening analyzing it.

Here’s what you need to know:

— Aakash Gupta 🚀 Product Growth Guy (@aakashg0) April 1, 2023

My attempt at a solution (at least until I forget about it, and just for the links) is instead to NOT include links in tweets but instead refer to a new generic ‘link in bio‘ that will now point to an “All the links from my Twitter” page on this blog. Any link that I want to share on Twitter I’ll instead add to the page, and include instructions in the Tweet about how to find it.

These instructions will largely be redundant when the Tweet is sent because the link will be at the top of the page, so easily findable. But I’ll share other Tweets ‘with’ other links referenced, so more and more links will appear on that page. Bearing in mind that each new link added there will push the previous one further down [I’m going to go with reverse chronology] and that someone may come across an older Tweet of mine and want to see the link… I recommend including info about Ctrl+F to jump straight to it.

Ctrl+F or Edit / Find or any ‘search on this page’ instruction is always useful to share (works on web, PDFs, Excel, pretty much anything). On an older iPhone you pull down on the web page and type your search term in the address bar. On a newer one the address bar is at the bottom. I don’t know about Android.

For obvious reasons I didn’t connect the posting of this blog post via my Twitter account 😉 Normally whenever I post something here it automatically pings out a Tweet because I previously connected WordPress to my Twitter account (@JoBrodie).

How the order of links in tweets determines which one gets its accompanying image displayed

tl;dr – the last link in a tweet is the one that will show up with a media preview if that link has Twitter cards associated with it (eg almost all news sites, see below for explanation).

If two links are tweeted but one has cards and the other doesn’t then the order doesn’t matter, the cards link always shows up.

If a tweet includes the link to another tweet then the tweet will always appear (it will look the same as how a quote RT looks) because a linked tweet will override any other link that has media preview capability / Twitter cards. (If two tweet links are shared then the last one shows up)

If you want to override any of this and control what appears in the media preview you can just upload or paste in an image.

Note: by ‘order’ I mean the position in which they are in the tweet, not the order in which they were added.

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Some tweets that have a link included will display the text of the tweet and the text of the link – the whole tweet is just text, with the link in a different colour (often blue, but different profile colours chosen can mean they’ll show in a different colour if you’re on their profile).

This is my test account ‘FriendlyBlocker‘ (set up to test Twitter’s block functions) publishing a tweet which contains only a link to a Wikipedia article I wrote on the nonsense that is CEASE therapy – the link shows up as a link.

Tweet with a Wikipedia link in it

In a different tweet below I’ve shared a link to a BBC article, and nothing else. The link is nowhere to be seen in the ‘bit where the text would go’. Instead there’s just a clickable picture that takes you to the article. This is because the BBC site has set up Twitter cards so that the shared link automatically pulls the image from the BBC’s website and displays it as a media preview. The link shows up as a picture.

Tweet with a BBC link in it

 

I’ve occasionally shared more than one link in a tweet and expected one of them to show up as a picture and been a bit surprised when the other one has. I thought I’d investigate what role the order of the links might play, and different types of links. Here are the results of my study into this phenomenon 😉

1. If one of the links is associated with Twitter Cards and the other one isn’t then the order dosn’t matter at all, the cards one will always be displayed as the image. You can always override this by uploading an image to your tweet, then both links will show as links. (You can upload an image or just Ctrl+V to paste one in).

   

   Two tweets both containing the same two links to Wikipedia article and to this blog. As WordPress blogs have Twitter cards and Wikipedia seems not to, the WP blog post is always displayed as an image and not just as a link.

2. Where two or more links each having Twitter cards associated with them then the order does matter. From my mildly extensive testing it seems that LAST is where to put the one you want to appear as the image.

   

   Two tweets with two links, with the order of the links reversed. Both links have Twitter cards associated with them and in both cases the second link posted is the one that shows up as an image.

3. It looks like the link of another tweet included in a tweet (as opposed to retweeting) will override any other link that has a Twitter card.

   

   Two tweets, two links (one of them to another tweet) showing that the order makes no difference and the Twitter card for the tweet is always diplayed.

   Again this could be overridden by including a separate image if you don’t want the text of the tweet to show up and do want the image to show up of the link.

   

   Adding an image overrides the Twitter cards and makes the order of the links irrelevant.

   Note that quote tweeting the tweet and adding a link also doesn’t work, the tweet will override whatever link is added in the quote part.

   

   A quote RT of a tweet, with a link to this blog (which has Twitter cards associated with it) added. The tweet overrides and shows up in the media area.

4. Just to demonstrate that it’s the LAST position for the link to show up as the image in the media area (where all links have cards associated with them, and none of them is a tweet URL…) here are three links with the order varied, in all cases the link placed last is the one that shows up as the picture.If one of the links is a tweet that’ll override everything else and always show up, regardless of the order.This is what I wrote for the three tweets, from top to bottom.Link B (BBC) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47242477
   Link C (Buzzfeed) https://www.buzzfeed.com/farrahpenn/cleaning-hacks-that-are-borderline-genius
   Link A (blog) https://howtodotechystuff.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/hate-seeing-other-peoples-likes-on-twitter-some-options-to-try/Link A (blog) https://howtodotechystuff.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/hate-seeing-other-peoples-likes-on-twitter-some-options-to-try/
   Link C (Buzzfeed) https://www.buzzfeed.com/farrahpenn/cleaning-hacks-that-are-borderline-genius
   Link B (BBC) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47242477

   Link A (blog) https://howtodotechystuff.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/hate-seeing-other-peoples-likes-on-twitter-some-options-to-try/
   Link B (BBC) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47242477
   Link C (Buzzfeed) https://www.buzzfeed.com/farrahpenn/cleaning-hacks-that-are-borderline-genius

   

5. And for completists here are tweets containing two links to two other tweets, re-ordered. In both cases the last link is the one that shows up.
   –https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/status/1077394079955193856—
   –https://twitter.com/JoBrodie/status/1077393442769174528–The text of the URL for the tweets is shown above (made as non-clicky links to show the actual link, WordPress automatically converts tweet URLs to an embedded tweet)

 

 

Searching for a link (URL, address) on Twitter

Twitter’s search will let you find almost* all the tweets that contain a particular link. You can just plug in part of the link into search (desktop Twitter‘s best for this). To view all the tweets choose ‘live’ from the options and scroll down to go further into the past.

What have your friends said about this link?
If you want to see what people you follow have tweeted about this link you can restrict the search just to them. This can be useful if you click on a link earlier in the day, forget who sent it but want to acknowledge them in a tweet you subsequently send – you can work out from whom you saw the tweet.

A note on how to search for a link – try different bits of the address
Twitter’s search can be a bit mercurial – or, I haven’t worked out exactly what’s going on yet. Sometimes putting the entire link in yields nothing… sometimes it yields something. I generally select a bit of the link and choose a bit that’s likely to winnow out irrelevant tweets.

A note on the appearance of the link
Twitter does not distinguish among modified (shortened) links that point to the same web page, so searching will bring up a variety of different-links all going to the same place.

Example: here’s an address: http://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/views-from-the-nhs-frontline/2015/jul/13/wasting-gps-time-no-i-cant-prescribe-you-new-shoes and if you search for it on Twitter you’ll get these results which include these shortened versions of the URL which all point to the same page

• gu.com/p/4ah5d
• fb.me/1YEUv3eHl
• bit.ly/1O0dUsZ 

If you want to share a link without having it show up in searches try something like donotlink.com (effectively it ‘cloaks’ the link by pointing to an intermediate site first).

Saving time when searching again
If you’ve just searched for apples and bananas you’ll first see all the Top tweets and then have to click ‘Live‘ to see all of them. If you decide you want to search for apples and pears you can avoid this two-step process by editing the search-result-link in the address bar (desktop Twitter only).

The first link is: https://twitter.com/search?q=apples%20and%20bananas&src=typd&vertical=default&f=tweets

Replace bananas with pears and press ‘go’.

https://twitter.com/search?q=apples%20and%20pears&src=typd&vertical=default&f=tweets