Twitter’s Algo Has Been Open Sourced

0:00Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top-level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Hsu.

0:20All right, so we are going to talk about how Twitter's algorithm has been open sourced and the implications behind that in business and in marketing. So Neil, you want to go into it a little bit and I'm going to share my screen. Yeah, there was a news article about Twitter's algorithm and how someone ended up leaking it out. I don't think it was Twitter who ended up releasing it, right? I'm pretty sure. No, they released it, the GitHub. And Elon said he would do it a year ago. I thought someone else released some of Twitter's source code online before they did. No, they've been releasing everything.

0:52The Twitter files, they want to make it open source. He's trying to build accountability. Okay, that's great. So he's releasing his source code. And the moment it is open source, the other thing you're going to end up finding, which we're already seeing right now, is a lot of other players using some of the code to go and create copycats. And in marketing, if you make it easy for other people to copy you, you are going to get copycat. It doesn't mean they're going to be successful, but it does mean that you are going to get more copycats. And that is one thing to keep in mind. But on the flip side, it ends up building out a lot of trust.

1:27If you end up releasing, you know, everything out there, you're letting people know what you're doing. You're actually building a bigger sense of community than if you didn't do that, which I thought was a really smart move on Elon's end. I know that he promised that he was going to do it. I didn't realize that it first started with them. I actually thought that someone else ended up releasing parts of it and then they went and released everything. Yeah. As much as people hate him, I know one of our negative reviews is like bro-y tech soup. Like, you know, they worship Elon. It's like, no, no, no.

1:56Like he actually builds good products and like the guy doesn't need to work anymore. Right. And like, this is one of those things like he doesn't need to open source. He doesn't need to reveal all these things kind of with the Twitter files. Right. He doesn't need to build his own city. no he doesn't need to go to mars he doesn't need to do all this stuff doesn't need to like you know all the implants that starlink by the way have you used starlink i just use it for the first time flying back this weekend or flying to the vegas yeah i'm like whoa like starlink's amazing so so i was looking at the cost to put jsx in a plane it's 15 to 25 grand i believe was the cost on a monthly basis it's expensive yeah well it's amazing i mean but we digress so i want to share my screen and show you kind of from a marketer standpoint, what you can learn about the open sourcing, because like you have developers that are kind of breaking down, like, Hey, this is actually how this part works.

2:42Like, do you actually get a boost over here? So I'm going to share this over here and here we go. All right. You see this? Yes. I see it. Okay. So some initial takeaways you're following to follower ratio matters, right? It's like, if you have a hundred thousand followers and you have a hundred thousand people that you're following i guess it matters like i never thought that would matter what do you think about that like i never thought that was a big deal but apparently because back in the day people were using twitter to get oh yeah yeah yeah a ton of people and a lot of people auto fall back and then they remove the followers that didn't follow back and then they start following more they were doing that heavily even i was doing that heavily when twitter first came out when i first met neil we're like this is like when we're like both like 25 or 26.

3:29So this is like 10 plus years ago. I would go to his place in Seattle and he had a separate Mac running. And the only thing the other Mac was running was the app. Because it was following people and then it would unfollow them. Because what you do in the app is you'd put a keyword of all the followers you want to follow you. So like I would put an SEO or digital marketing and I'd find all the people tweeting about that stuff, follow them. And then seven days later for the people who didn't follow back, it would unfollow them. But I had a computer just running, doing that one thing full time. Yeah.

4:01Okay. Twitter blue. So if you're paying for Twitter, subscribers do get a slight boost in the algorithm. And then you can see over here is the open source over here, the code. And so if here's what I wanted to call out over here, let's not call it like this, you know, political stuff, but here's the one that I enjoy the most over here. So to put these feedback loops into perspective, a user clicking on your tweet and staying there for greater than two minutes is weighted 20 times more than them just liking your tweet. Okay. Now, if they click into your profile through your tweet and like reply to a tweet, 24 times more than a like.

4:35If they reply to your tweet, 54 times more than a like. If they reply to your tweet and they respond to your reply, 150x more than a like, right? And if they report your tweet, negative 738x, right? I don't know where he got that number from, but it's just good to see the inner workings of this. I'd like to see this summarized a little more. dude i love this if they report your treat negative 738 x the effect of a like parentheses you're basically screwed yep yep government requested so you can see there's a class here like if the government requests like takedown or something like that like it's all in here and so are we going to see more copycats like absolutely but i think the fact that he's doing this it will build more trust but here's the other thing like there is a risk here because open sourcing this It's like, oh, why can't I just like rebuild this or someone can fork it and like, you know, completely just focus on this.

5:26Like that could be a very big risk there. And then you're also going to get more politicians and governments scrutinizing how you're doing things and paying people to look at the code and figure out more ways to sue you and make a quick buck. Yep. Anyway, anything else you want to add here? No, I believe. Well, check this out. One second. Your tweets relevancy decreases over time at a rate of 50 % every six hours. That's a lot. Yeah. So you need people to interact within the first few hours of a tweet as quick as possible, and you're going to more likely to do better. But look, I'm a big believer in being transparent with the community.

6:02The more transparent you are and the more open you are, I believe you're going to build a stronger community and you're going to do better in the long run. You're going to get some haters from it, but it is worth it. All right. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, resubscribe. Also hit us on YouTube as well. And also levelingup.com slash founders. Our next mastermind is in Beverly Hills, August 7th to the 9th. And we will see you later. We appreciate you joining us for this session of Marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show. And visit marketingschool.io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success.

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