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Somewhere between Facebook Groups and a Reddit-style forum, the Twitter Communities feature was announced this month as “a way to easily find and connect with people who want to talk about the same things you do.”

“Think of Communities as places created for conversation where the vibe and tone is set by people who share the same interests and want to have relevant conversations. ”

— Twitter

Examples of community topics in the tests so far have included dogs, weather, sneakers, skincare, and astrology.

Community moderators pick the focus, create the rules, and invite members and other to moderators. Once you’re a member, you can like or reply to tweets sent by other members. As a member you also get a new option when you compose a Tweet: Send it to all your followers, or just your Community.

imagine an alternate timeline where everyone just gets yousay hi to Communities—the place to connect with people who Tweet like you. testing now on iOS and web, Android soon! pic.twitter.com/TJdKwUa4D2

— Twitter Communities (@HiCommunities) September 8, 2021

Community creation is currently limited but promises to be more widely available in the coming months. Right now, you have to be invited to an existing group by a mod or another member. In the meantime, if you're interested in creating a Community, check out the Interest Form.

Why it Matters

This change builds on previous efforts to centralize topic-based conversation, such as recommended topics (and even as far back as the hashtag). The new Communities effort aims to build on this and create more of a draw to bring users back to Twitter more frequently, and to contribute to the topics they are passionate about.

Twitter reportedly plans to eventually place Communities front and center on the main navigation bar of its mobile app. So this is definitely something to keep an eye on in the coming months.

This also builds on several new features that have come out (and, in some cases, fizzled out) in the past few years, such as the audio-focused Spaces, paid Tweets, and newsletter hosting. Twitter seems to be taking a “spaghetti at the wall” approach as they search for the next big wins that will define the next decade of Twitter.

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Here are a few more shareworthy items we’ve been reading this month…

Channel Updates & News:

• Introducing A New Way to Say “Happy Birthday” on Snapchat (Snapchat blog)

• Breaking Down How Instagram Search Works (IG blog)

• How LinkedIn is using AI to fight unauthorized data scraping (LinkedIn blog)

• Introducing “The Upload,” the first podcast from YouTube (YouTube blog)

• Twitter Spaces Getting a Recording Option (Social Media Today)

• Twitter Experiments with New Visual Editor, Incorporating Fleets Tools (Social Media Today)

• Instagram Adds New 'Map Search' Tool to Maximize Business Discovery (Social Media Today)

• Instagram is Developing a New 'Montage' Feature to Convert Stories to Reels, New 'Favorites' Listing (Social Media Today)

• LinkedIn Expands Professional 'Learning Hub', Makes 40 Popular Course Available for Free (Social Media Today)

• Introducing Facebook Fantasy Games (Facebook blog)

• TikTok World is a free virtual conference on Sept. 28 (TikTok blog)

• Clubhouse rolling out “spatial audio” feature (Clubhouse blog)

• New "Wave" feature coming to Clubhouse (Clubhouse blog)

Stories & Analysis

• The Wall Street Journal’s 5-part “Facebook Files” (See additional commentary here, and Facebook’s response here)

• LinkedIn's Employee Well-Being Report (LinkedIn blog)

• Taylor Swift is a Model Community Manager (SproutSocial blog)

• Visualizing the global #ExtremeWeather conversation on Twitter (Twitter blog)

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