Twitter Communities: a game-changer or another feature nobody will use?

If you’re a Twitter user, you may have noticed a new feature was added recently: Communities. As a Twitter junkie, here’s my thoughts.

In essence, Communities is like an upgrade to Twitter’s existing ‘List’ functionality (which still exists in its own right).

My first impression is that Communities could be really powerful if people adopt it – but of course, that’s not guaranteed – remember Fleets?

Communities are essentially mini Twitter feeds around a specific subject, passion or subject area. 

Communities are public, so you can read the Tweets — but only members can interact with them. Only members can like, comment or retweet posts in a Community… and everything stays within the Community, it doesn’t get shared to wider Twitter.

You can create your own Communities and invite people to join them.

This is a really neat little innovation from Twitter – it has a completely different feel to Groups on Linked In and its use case is actually completely different. 

Communities allow you to curate your Twitter feed by interests and people with similar passions in a way never possible before.

One of the biggest problems I’ve always had with Twitter is that I have two very different public profiles – as a digital marketer/business owner and as a fiction author.

When my first novel was published in 2016, I tried to reflect both this and my business self on my Twitter profile, but found the balancing act impossible. 

If I posted about books, I alienated my digital marketing and employee advocacy audience – and vice versa.

In the end, I chose to make Twitter the ‘face’ of my author self and by and large, I stopped tweeting about or engaging with the employee advocacy and digital marketing community on there.

With Communities, however, the door is now open to have distinct Twitter communities that service different facets of my professional life and personality. 

I can create employee advocacy communities, I can join digital marketing communities as well as book and writing related communities – and my posts will only be seen by the people interested in seeing them.

It’s not just interesting from a professional perspective. There’s already a Wordle community… it’s purpose? ‘To be able to share Wordle scores without angering the broader twitter masses.’ 

Communities is potentially completely game-changing for Twitter users and the network in general. Am really interested to see how people actually use them and how it pans out.

Only small gripe I have is that it’s impossible to search and find communities to join on the mobile app – you can only do this on desktop. Not the end of the world, but still…

If you want to find me on Twitter, my handle is @nijay – but be warned, my main feed is currently all books and dogs…