Twitter officially launches new weekly ‘people you may know’ email to encourage new follows [Updated]

Twitter has been experimenting with a variety of new email formats to increase engagement and takeup of following on its service. Today, they’re introducing one that they’ve been testing that introduces you to ‘people you may know’ on Twitter, hoping that you’ll use the list to follow a few more people.

The email is a handful of people that you may want to follow, no more, no less. It looks to be more use of the technology of the social summary tool Summify, which it acquired in January. It previously used this tech to produce the weekly summary emails it began sending in April.

Twitter explains how the people are chosen:

Suggestions are based on signals like who your friends follow and the contact information imported by people you know. For example, if several people you know follow someone, you may also know them and want to follow them too.

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Twitter has a unique problem to solve when it comes to encouraging users to engage more. The fact is that Twitter is nothing until you start following people, and the quality and relevance of the people that you follow has a direct bearing on how much you check the service and how much you interact with tweets you see there.

Obviously, for advertising and growth reasons, getting eyes on Twitter is the most important thing, even if a huge number of people are ‘looking’ rather than tweeting. So these emails, and others like them, are designed to flesh out the timeline of users with content that makes them want to come back and look more often.

Back when Twitter launched its email digests, I felt that they were a great move, despite a lot of complaining to the contrary.

Unlike the email digest, however, there does not seem to be a separate setting for this email in your Email Notifications section on Twitter, at least as of yet. So for those of you who don’t want to see this email, It seems you’ll want to untick the ‘News about Twitter’ box.

Update: As you can see below, Twitter is now displaying a separate setting for those email notifications.

Image credit: DOUGLAS E. CURRAN / AFP / Getty Images