Twitter has launched a weekly email digest for users featuring a summary of relevant tweets and stories shared by the people they’re connected with on Twitter. The new feature is being rolled out to all Twitter users over the next few weeks, and will help users to “discover the best of Twitter”, Othman Laraki, Twitter's growth and international director, announced on the company’s blog.

Best of the best

The email digest is designed to emulate the newly updated Discover tab in Twitter, emphasising who shared each story alongside a summary of each story, to help users decide if it’s of interest. Stories can then be read, favourited and shared directly from the email, and related tweets from people within the user’s network can be perused. In addition, the digest includes the most engaging tweets of the week seen by people the user follows – including tweets from people the user doesn’t follow.

Talent acquisitions

The new feature comes just a few months after Twitter acquired Canadian start-up Summify, a news aggregator service that uses social data to deliver a personalised daily digest to users’ inboxes. The service was disabled in January after their developers joined Twitter’s Growth team in San Francisco to “continue to explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.” Personalised email marketing provider RestEngine, another recent Twitter acquisition, may have also paved the way for the development of the email digest.

Redesign

The new feature is a component of the network’s major redesign that looks to bring personalisation into the foreground – a process that began in December. Twitter is making an effort to bring users closer to the content and tweets they care about, making content discovery easier. The updated Discover tab is also a part of this effort, sharing real-time stories and popular tweets using an algorithm that chooses links based on users’ activity. The company hopes to use features like this “to bridge the gap between the awareness of Twitter and the engagement on Twitter,” said CEO Dick Costolo at the launch.

Opportunity

From a marketer’s perspective, the email digest poses another opportunity for marketers to surface their content to Twitter users. Recent research from URL shortening service bitly indicates that a link in Twitter has a shelf life of less than three hours, making it easy for tweets to get buried under frequently updated Twitter streams. However, discovery engines increase the opportunity to get marketing content in front of users and increase brand visibility. Marketers can increase the possibility of being featured in these personalised streams by encouraging their audience to share their content with the inclusion of social media sharing links and buttons next to every piece of content they publish.

Twitter’s newest development allows for a greater chance of visibility for brands with a Twitter presence, making it more important than ever for marketers to maintain an active Twitter presence and share their best content.