New: Twitter Tests Suggestion Feature “You May Also Like”

Twitter has long struggled with how to make its site more sticky. One of the major criticisms over the years is that new users aren’t find enough on the network to become regular users.

Twitter has been working to solve the early interest gap in a number of ways, including pushing tweets from people you don’t follow into your feed and the “While you were away” feature to let mobile users know what they have been missing since last signing on.

Now, it appears the company is testing a new display unit on on Twitter.com. Spotted today by Marketing Land editor in chief Matt McGee, the “You may also like” feature shows up in the right-rail on some individual tweet pages. It shows several tweets, some related to the content of the main tweet, some not. With the small sample-size — we saw the display on four of 10 tweets we checked — it wasn’t possible to see a pattern.

That real estate is normally empty, which either is a nice empty-space design touch or a wasted opportunity to display content.

Here’s how the four examples looked:

This seems like a smart move on Twitter’s part. Many of the company’s attempts to boost engagement have been met with derision from power users who object to tinkering with the chronological nature of the network. We can’t imagine many objections to adding to the window dressing around feeds.

Assuming that more individual tweets will soon be surfaced by Twitter’s impending full Google indexing, this move could also help drive casual visitors deeper into the site.