Welcome Back Your Friend - Twitter's New Retention Tactic

We have just seen a very interesting pop up on Twitter.

“Your friend @Username is back on Twitter! Mention them in a Tweet to welcome them back.”

Twitter is encouraging us to engage with people who have returned to the site after a period of inactivity. They also include a ‘Compose a Tweet’ button to make the outreach much easier.

The social network has a problem with retaining users - it is one of the reasons we see such conflicting user numbers. So many users have signed up to the user but these accounts lay dormant through lack of activity. Twitter often email inactive users to encourage them to return but are now turning to people you know and trust to give you that little push back to the service. 

Hopefully, Twitter will not be overusing this feature as it may be quite irritating for some users and could actually make people unfollow users. This will occur if Twitter keeps encouraging us to engage with people we do not actually know. 

It could be a risky move by Twitter but it shows their long term commitment to re-engaging inactive users. 

Have you noticed this box? What are your thoughts on it?