Twitter Adds Hashtag Discovery to Communities to Help Improve Engagement

Twitter added a new element of discovery to its group-like communities, with a new visualization of the main hashtags used in each communitywhich will then link you to relevant tweets on those topics.

As you can see from this example, the Communities pages on Android and the web (coming soon on iOS) will now display a list of the most used hashtags within that group in a new panel above the tweet feed. Tap any tag and then you can see all the tweets from that community that have used that tag.

It could be another way to encourage more participation within communities, which so far doesn’t seem to have become an important element of the tweeting experience.

Originally launched in September of last year, Communities is Twitter’s attempt to capitalize on the popularity of more closed-topic discussions, incorporating elements of Facebook and Reddit groups to establish another way of interacting through tweets.

Which is interesting and definitely worth experimenting with, although anecdotal feedback so far suggests that engagement within communities is relatively low, and the required change in usual behavior is likely to be a significant barrier to adoption within the app.

Part of the problem seems to be that many communities have smaller audiences than many individual users have on their own profiles. So if you can post to a community and get limited engagement, or post to your own profile and get a lot more reach, the incentive to use the option isn’t that significant.

Twitter’s initial approach, in which Communities were ‘invite only’ or ‘open to all’, may also have affected general interest, because you had to know someone who was already active in an area of ​​interest to gain access to a community, whereas ‘open to all’ groups quickly filled with spam, driving users away.

Twitter has since moved to address this, with a ‘Request to join’ option, where community administrators can approve or reject requests. But it seems those initial missteps may have dampened interest, which hasn’t helped make Communities a key tweet option so far.

Still, Twitter says that has been happy with the adoption of Communities So far, and without official usage numbers, we don’t really know how important Communities currently is as a connection tool.

Could still become a thing, even with Twitter refocusing your resources on your core elementsand walking away from his newer experiments.

I mean, Twitter added 9 million more users last quarter, so it must be doing some things right to improve engagement. And as these new users come on board, who are less familiar with how Twitter worked in the past, perhaps Communities and its other newer tools like Spaces will become more commonly used.