According to Social Media Today, Twitter Communities seems determined to push ahead with the project, with its latest Communities addition being algorithmic sorting within Communities streams. So far, Twitter’s algorithm matching hasn’t shown much help for personalization, generally, the people you engage with most and the most popular tweets take priority in algorithm-defined feeds.

Now, users have the option to sort their Community feed by either ‘For you’, which will display the top tweets in each community, based on your engagement history, or ‘Latest’, so the newest community contributions appear at the top. Twitter’s algorithms are good at highlighting the best tweets to each user.

As explained by Twitter, “The setting each person chooses will become the new default every time they visit that Community. The setting is unique to each Community and can be changed at any given moment, giving people the ability to choose and customize how they view each of their Communities separately based on their preference.”

This could make it easier to engage in your chosen communities, especially in more popular groups, by surfacing the most relevant tweets for you.

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Algorithm personalization is the key to maximizing user engagement, with the system being able to adjust to your preferences very quickly and keep feeding you more of what you like. Twitter’s systems are nowhere near that, with its ‘Accounts to Follow’ and ‘Topics’ recommendations regularly being way off anything close to relevant for most users.

Twitter has access to more trending conversations than any other platform, but it’s never found a great way to highlight those chats to each individual user. It still could, but without that capacity, most of these types of ‘top tweets’ displays don’t really push the needle on engagement.

Based on anecdotal evidence, Communities, in general, don’t appear to be taking off, but Twitter has said that it’s happy with Communities’ take-up, and it could still become a thing if Twitter can find more ways to maximize engagement. Though that could be even more difficult now, with Twitter refocusing its resources on its core elements, and shifting away from experiments.

In another update, you can now add a pinned Tweet to the top of a Community timeline. It functions in the same way as a normal pinned Tweet and will be a useful addition to Twitter Communities. It could be used as a prompt to spark discussion or a way to display important news and announcements. While Twitter Communities has been slow to take off, they’re still in the relatively early stages, and this update could go a long way in bringing them out of the shadows.

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