Soon, Communities pages on Android and the web will display a listing of the most used Hashtags within that group, in a panel above the Tweet Feed. Tapping on any tag allows you then view all of the Tweets from within that Community that have used the same tag.
#Discovery
It could be another way to encourage more engagement within Communities, which has still not become a major element in the overall Tweet experience. Originally launched last September, Communities is Twitter’s attempt to tap into the popularity of more enclosed, topical discussion, incorporating elements of both Facebook Groups and Reddit to establish another way to interact via Tweet.
It’s an interesting and worthy experiment, however, anecdotal feedback has, thus far, suggested that engagement within Communities has been relatively low, with the required shift in habitual behavior likely being a barrier to adoption within the app. Part of the issue seems to be that many Communities have smaller audiences than many individual users have on their profiles. So, if you can post to a Community, getting limited engagement from it, then how is that more enticing than posting on their personal accounts that grant more reach?
Twitter’s initial approach, which saw Communities being either ‘invite-only’ or ‘open to all’, may have also impacted overall interest because you either had to know someone already active within an interest area to gain access to one, while ‘open to all’ groups were quickly spammed to oblivion. Twitter has since moved to address this with a ‘request to join’ option, where Community admins can approve or deny requests. It does seem like these initial slip-ups have somewhat negatively impacted takeup, and yet, Twitter says that it has been happy with the growth of Communities thus far and without official usage numbers, we can’t really gauge how significant Communities currently is as a connection tool.
As more of these new users come on board, who should be less familiar with how Twitter has worked in the past, maybe Communities, and its host of other tools, might yet become more habitual usage elements.
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