Twitter’s looking to further enhance smaller community engagement in the app with the launch of a new test that will enable Communities admins to create dedicated audio space within their groups. Now, certain Community admins on Twitter will be able to launch audio chats, which will only be visible within the group.
As Twitter explains:
“With this experiment, a group of admins and moderators in the US will receive access to create live Spaces within their Twitter Communities. Audio in Communities adds an extra layer of personality and connectivity beyond 280 characters; by initiating live audio conversations specific to a Community and topic, Community admins will be able to better lead their Communities, engage their members, and participate in quality conversations with others who share the same interests.”
Testing, Testing, Hello…
When a Space is launched within a Community that you’re a member of, it’ll be highlighted in the Space bar at the top of your home timeline, giving all group members an opportunity to tune in. Users visiting a Community will also be able to view and join a Space started in that group, but only members of the host Community can reply and engage in the Space.
You can say that it’s like Reddit’s Red Talks audio chat option, which sees audio chats hosted within Reddit communities, and Facebook’s Community Audio Channels. Of course, Facebook had abandoned its audio social push, sparked by the sudden rise of Clubhouse, and overall enthusiasm for audio engagement options has died down, though chat tools such as this might still uncover certain niche use cases.
The benefit of this approach, specifically, is enhanced discovery. You join groups that are focused on topics that you’re interested in, meaning that the audio chats you’ll then be seeing in the app, ideally, will also be more aligned with your interests. As it stands, Twitter still has trouble highlighting the most relevant lice audio chats to each user in its Audio Tab. For one, you can’t know what people are going to talk about in a Space while it’s currently live, and Two, Twitter’s algorithms aren’t that great at showcasing content based on your interests.
Twitter has tried solving this by adding topic tags in Spaces, and more recently, topic streams in the audio tab, which enables users to have more direct input into their experience. Chats in Spaces will provide another way to better filter this and highlight the most relevant chats to each user – if it takes off, it could become a strong in-app engagement element.
The Wrap
Of course, all of this depends on whether or not people are actually using Twitter Spaces or Communities. Twitter hasn’t provided any usage info either for some time and in general, it doesn’t seem like a lot of engagement is happening on either too. But maybe, just maybe, this could be another way to help enhance community engagement, which could help unlock the potential of both options in the future. It might be a valuable addition and might well be worth an experiment or two.
Subscribe to our‘Bottoms Up!’ Newsletter. Get the latest social media blogs about news, updates, trends, and effective social media strategies to take your business to the highest level from Tristan Ahumada and Jeff Pfitzer.
Please note:
This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin.
Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.
