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 an author and as a digital marketer and business owner.
Prior to my first novel was published in 2016, my Twitter was exclusively about digital marking, online communities and digital content.
After Beat The Rain came out, I tried to reflect both my ‘novel self’ and ‘my business self’ on Twitter, but I found the balancing act impossible.
If I posted about one thing, I alienated one audience or the other.
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 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 like Book Twitter – 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.
About The Author
Nigel Cooper
Nigel’s debut novel Beat The Rain was a semi-finalist for Best Debut Author in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2016. His second novel The Pursuit of Ordinary was a finalist in the People’s Book Prize for Fiction 2019. It was also one of the 8-12 titles ‘called in’ for the Man Booker Prize, a first for his publisher. It was also long-listed for The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize. His third novel will be released in September 2022 and is now available for pre-order. Nigel brings his own experience of the trials of getting published, building an author profile and marketing his own novels to AuthorSpark. As well as co-founding AuthorSpark, Nigel co-founded digital marketing agency and employee advocacy platform We Are Togethr alongside Andrew, alongside online content sister company Togethr Lab. Prior to that he was a newspaper subeditor and a writer and editor for Channel 4 Interactive.