How would you like to share some of your tweets with a group of people instead of the world at large? If so, then you’ll be happy to learn about Twitter Communities.
Twitter Communities is still in development. It hasn’t been released yet.
But Twitter presented the idea as part of its Analyst Day presentation.
And it looks like it’s really close to going live.
In this article, I’ll share with you what we know about Twitter’s new online communities.
Twitter Introduces Communities: A Place to Share With Like-Minded Groups
Twitter Communities: The Choice Is Yours
Here’s how it will work: when you compose a tweet, Twitter will give you the option of sharing it with everyone or sharing it with one of your Communities.
The Communities will appear in a dropdown below the composed tweet. You can select one of the Communities or select “Everyone” (displayed at the top of the dropdown).
But why would you want to share a tweet with just a group of people instead of everybody?
Because you might have multiple interests.
Let’s say you’re a digital marketer who’s also an NCAA basketball fan. Most of your followers probably follow you to learn more about digital marketing.
But these days you like to tweet about how much Oral Roberts University messed up your NCAA bracket.
Lots of folks who follow you won’t care to read about that. But some will.
It’s those “some” who belong in your “NCAA Basketball” Community. You can tweet to them without annoying everybody else who really doesn’t care about college basketball.
And you may have other interests as well that all your followers don’t share. Once again, you don’t want to tweet about those interests to everybody. Just the people who share those interests.
Twitter Communities is a great way to share what’s on your mind without flooding the timelines of your followers who might not want to read about everything you like.
What We Know (From Reverse Engineering)
Reverse engineering guru Jane Manchun Wong managed to get a look at the back-end code of the Twitter app. I’ll share what she found about Communities.
By the way, the fact that it’s in the back-end code means that it’s close to deployment. You might see it by this summer.
Once the feature goes live, you’ll initially be given the option to share your tweet with everyone or “A community that doesn’t exist.”
Because, at that time, you won’t have any Twitter Communities.
If you click on “A community that doesn’t exist,” Twitter will take you to a screen that will allow you to create a new Community.
It looks like you can set the standards for what goes on in a Community you create. But you’ll have to follow somebody else’s rules if you join a Community that another user established.
For example: in some Twitter Communities, only members can tweet and reply. But others might be open to the public.
Also, everybody might be able to view, like, quote-tweet, and share tweets from a Community even if they can’t tweet.
(Again, I’m just theorizing here. But that’s what it looks like.)
The Community home page will also include “Home” and “About” tabs. The “Home” tab will show all the tweets that belong to the Community. The “About” tab will show access rights, the date the Community was created, and who created it.
Twitter Community Page Example
Wrapping It Up
Twitter is releasing Communities as part of a broader set of new features that includes Spaces, Fleets, and subscriptions.
It’s all part of the social media company’s plan to generate $7.5 billion in revenue by 2023.
As a digital marketer, you might find that a great way to use Communities is with market segmentation. Create different Communities for each segment and share relevant tweets.
That could get you more engagements.
