Do you have an active Twitter Community that you want to promote to more potential members?
This could help – Twitter has finally released its Community Spotlight profile module to all Professional Profile users, which enables you to showcase a chosen community above your tweet feed on your Twitter presence.
As you can see in this example, shared by Twitter engineer Dongwook Chung, Community Spotlight is now available to all community admins and mods who are have also switched to a professional profile in the app.
Twitter first began testing this in October last year, with selected creators invited to showcase their communities.
Now it’s being made more widely available. The option is currently available on desktop only, but the module itself, once activated, is visible on all devices.
It could be a good way for brand accounts to highlight relevant Twitter communities, and encourage more related engagement and discussion, which could help to increase engagement and alignment in the app.
Though communities remain a fairly niche offering, with only some Twitter communities taking off, and many being left by the wayside as they go against the ‘public square’ ethos of the app.
Most people want to get their tweets seen by as many people as possible, and as such, restricting your potential exposure to only those within a specific group doesn’t really make a heap of sense. Most long-term Twitter users have also already established their ‘groups’ through what they post, and who they follow in the app, so further segmenting that has, for many, seemed unnecessary, which is why Twitter groups haven’t really taken off.
The same goes for ‘Circles’, another of Twitter’s enclosed tweet options – in trying to build on Twitter’s use case, it seems that these more siloed conversation elements haven’t resonated with most users (and worth noting – Elon Musk says that Circles will be culled soon, in favor of improved communities and DM chat features).
But maybe Communities can still work – maybe, by enhancing the control and promotional options for Twitter sub-groups, that could still facilitate new types of engagement and interaction, and build on Twitter’s value.
This is another step in that direction, which could be of particular interest to brand accounts.