X Will Now Display Posts from Communities You’ve Joined In Your Essential Feed

I’m unsure that X’s communities are ever going to be a key engagement space, or perhaps a precious consideration for many users. However the X team is attempting to boost communities engagement, within the hopes that it may indeed help facilitate more sorts of discussion within the app, and potentially provide one other pathway for growth, and even creator monetization, through enhanced connection inside specific niches.

X’s latest update on this front is that posts from communities that you simply’re a member of will now start to look in your major ‘For You’ feed, providing one other means to focus on community discussions within the app.

That might help to re-engage community members, by highlighting relevant discussions from the groups they’ve chosen to hitch, though the incontrovertible fact that X even feels the necessity to expand the looks of such posts suggests that it’s having issues with communities retention.

Communities was initially launched in late 2021, to be able to provide dedicated, topic-based spaces to share and discuss relevant subjects, without having to post for all to see.

The concept aligns with the evolving use of social media platforms, which has seen people increasingly shifting their sharing and engagement to non-public messaging groups, versus public broadcasting, on account of the potential backlash and criticism that may come while you open your opinions to broader judgment.

Due to increasingly divisive nature of the major feed, more people have retreated to smaller, more contained groups, and communities is X’s answer, though to this point it seemingly hasn’t caught on in the best way that was originally hoped.

Early returns on communities didn’t appear to reflect a whole lot of interest in the choice, though previous management did report communities gaining more traction within the months before Elon Musk took over on the app.

But then got here the good staff cull, which also included the vast majority of the team that had been working on communities. Which gave the impression to be the death knell for the choice, but more recently, X owner Elon Musk has highlighted the potential of communities as a precious connective option.

Which has sparked renewed give attention to the choice, including the re-introduction of the power to highlight a community in your profile.

So it could still turn into a more relevant consideration, though it stays to be seen whether it actually adds value to the X experience, which, really, will largely hinge on how X communicates the usage of the choice.

As noted, originally, communities was devised so as to make users feel more comfortable about sharing within the app, to be able to encourage greater participation. The overwhelming majority of X’s 250 million day by day energetic users never post themselves, and the event team was in search of recent options to handle this aspect.

As former Twitter VP of consumer product Jay Sullivan explained early last yr:

“Certainly one of the things I hear from people is, ’Hey, I read a whole lot of stuff. I’m not necessarily comfortable tweeting or don’t know when or why I should tweet. I’d feel higher if I used to be tweeting to a smaller community of individuals.”

That was the core push behind the event of the choice, however it’s not clear whether it actually addresses that use case, especially given the reduced motivation for users to share their content with a smaller audience.

Because for many regular X users, they’ve already curated their community, by posting and following others over time, which has enabled them to determine a largely topic-focused group that responds to their updates.

For these users who’re already energetic, posting to a community just limits their reach. So why would they do this?

On this sense, it does seem to be the worth of communities is for newer users, or those less comfortable within the app. But relevant group discovery remains to be not great, and for a lot of, they’re probably not going to post anyway, even with a more enclosed group, because that’s not likely what the app has traditionally been for.

X is for staying up up to now on the newest news, but discussion of those topics tends to drift off to other places. The challenge of X is the way it keeps that engagement in-stream, for which there aren’t any easy answers, at the very least not yet.

Communities could well play a key role on this, but it’s going to require some re-angling from the X team to speak why people would wish to use them. And provided that the X doesn’t even have a communications department, I’m unsure how that push shall be undertaken, but possibly, through some changes in exposure, which enhance the give attention to communities, that may lead to more take-up.

Perhaps. There’s little evidence to suggest this as yet, however the X team is moving fast, and updates like this could possibly be one other step towards enhanced communities exposure.