Twitter update: adds new Hashtag discovery!

Twitter Communities in a recent tweet gave an update about the new feature – a new discovery element to its group-like Communities, with a new display of the top hashtags used in each community, which will then link a user to relevant tweets around those topics.

Communities pages on Android and the web (iOS launching soon) will display the most used hashtags within that group in a new panel above the tweet feed.

Where a user can tap on any tag and you’ll then be able to see all the tweets from within that community that has used that tag. This can be another way of encouraging more engagement within Communities.

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Initially, the update was launched in September of last year, where Twitter’s making an attempt to tap into the popularity of more enclosed, topical discussion, incorporating elements. This is interesting, and definitely worthy of the experiment.

Many Twitter communities have smaller audiences than many individual users on their own profiles. So if a user posts to any community, gets limited engagement, or posts to their own profile, and gets a lot more reach, the enticement for using the option is not that significant.

Communities either are ‘invite-only’ or ‘open to all‘, and that has impacted overall interest, because a user either has to know somebody already active within an interesting area to gain access to a community, while ‘open to all’ groups were quickly filled with spam, turning users away.

Twitter has since updated a ‘request to join’ option, where community admins are able to approve or deny requests. But it seems like those initial missteps may have reduced interest, which hasn’t helped to make Communities a key tweet option.

This result can become a new thing, even with Twitter refocusing its resources on its core elements and shifting away from its newer experiments.