Nearly five months after the initial launch of its Communities option, which enables users to share Tweets with specific user groups, Twitter announces that Communities is finally coming to Android! Android users are now able to access Communities’ more dedicated discussion spaces, increasing Twitter’s overall reach and engagement.
Communities is basically Twitter’s version of Facebook Groups, moving away from its traditional ‘Public Square’ Tweet approach and more into one that allows for better community building around specific subjects and discussions within the app.
Rock and Roll-ed Out
Despite the successful expansion onto another major user market, the success of Communities, thus far, is questionable at best. Most Communities, as per available anecdotal evidence, are highly inactive, with a part of the problem being that the same Communities are largely obsolete and restrictive, going against Twitter’s established incentive devices.
First point; regular Twitter users already have the ability to create a curated list, allowing them to hear from people that they would want to hear on their Feeds. Communities doesn’t really serve any significant purpose in keeping up-to-date with a user’s key topics of interest since it is more group-based rather than individually-driven.
While Communities do potentially allow you to seek out new Tweet discussions to join, thus expanding your Tweet activity. However, with Communities currently either being ‘invite-only’ or ‘open to all, that would mean that users interested in joining either know somebody who’s already a member, or risk joining a group that’s regularly filled with spam, and not the good, edible kind. Furthermore, new members can only invite up to five of their connections, marking somewhat of a major limitation when it comes to the joining process.
Secondly, prolific Tweets already have more followers on their personal handles than with what they can reach through Communities, which kind of diminishes the value of exclusive Communities-Tweeting. The thought of joining an exclusive conversation space only to get less engagement is quite under-appealing.
You can share your thoughts and opinions to a Community and get absolutely no reaction, but who on Earth would opt for that when you can have multiple people respond to your post on your personal account. Since Twitter has already engrained Like and replies as social currency on its network, the incentive to Tweet drives more users to share on the most active avenues, which reduces the motivation to share on the less active Community spaces.
Lastly, while much is left to be desired with Communities at present, Twitter is working on some of these elements, primarily with discoverability, which can variably help out Communities over time.
The Wrap
While some Communities are highly active, as it stands, it doesn’t look like Communities will become a major element of Tweet engagement, at least not anytime soon. Unless Twitter is able to substantially refine Communities in such a way that it becomes more engaging, it won’t catch on as much as they would’ve hoped for.
But all is not lost. Who knows, maybe the added Android audience can turn things around. After all, Twitter already has the engagement data and knows how active people are in Communities, maybe that’ll be enough to tell them whether or not the option is worth pushing in the future.
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