Twitter tests ‘Significant engagement’ notifications in its iOS app

Twitter is testing a new feature called “Significant engagement” in its iOS app. The company describes these achievements as “Important or higher than usual engagement with your account or Tweets.”

Not all iOS users have the new option in their Twitter settings, which explains why it’s not mentioned in the changelog on Apple’s App Store. Two staff members at TNW do, however, have the new option:

The feature is on by default for these two individuals, but as you can see above, it can also be turned off. If you keep it on, however, you will start to get notifications like this:

As our own Josh Ong points out, this is quite similar to AchievementBird, a Twitter experiment that sends you analytics via direct message. In fact, before the iOS app sent the above notification, AchievementBird sent its own DM:

Yet the above notification does not require following the AchivementBird account on Twitter: it just works out of the box. We confirmed this as our second staff member does not follow AchievementBird and nonetheless had this feature show up in their iOS app as well as received an achievement notification.

This suggests Twitter is still very interested in the gamification of its service. That being said, like any social network, the company regularly tests new features that never see the light of day. We haven’t seen the feature show up in Twitter’s Android app yet; if you see it, please do let us know.

We have contacted Twitter about “Significant engagement” in the iOS app. We will update this post if and when we hear back.

Update: “This is a new feature that is currently available to verified users,” a Twitter spokesperson confirmed with TNW. The company wouldn’t share any further details about its availability.

Update 2: Frederic Lardinois tells me the setting is in Twitter’s Android beta app as well.

See also – Twitter is experimenting with replacing its sacred retweet button with a ‘share’ button and Twitter is testing one-tap video playback across its mobile apps for Amplify partner clips

Top Image Credit: Andrew Burton / Getty Images