Twitter Spaces is a new feature that allows users to have live audio conversations on the platform. Spaces was launched last December 2020 and was first set to motion a month later for individual testing. Twitter describes Spaces as a “place to come together, built around the voices of the people using Twitter, your Twitter community”.
When someone speaks or is currently speaking, Spaces will appear at the top of your timeline with a purple bubble as long as it’s live. The moment you enter a random Twitter Spaces, you can now react to what you hear with emojis, tweet, DM, and a possible area for you to be allowed to speak.
HOW TO START YOUR TWITTER SPACE
Currently, you can only start your Twitter space in both iOS and Android. There’s no version available for web yet but you can still be able to join there as a listener.
For Hosts, there are two ways to start a Space on Twitter:
- Press and hold the “Compose” button then select the icon for new Spaces. This will look like multiple circles in the shape of a diamond.
- From your timeline, tap on your profile image at the top. Then scroll right and tap on the option to start a new Space.
When you first start using Spaces, Twitter will ask for permission to consent to having their speech captioned in real time. Twitter also plans on making Spaces accessible for screen readers in the future.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES
As a listener and a speaker, you can also have these:
Manage your speakers: You can mute and remove them from the Space of block them entirely. This feature helps people to manage and choose if they wish to eliminate offensive or if someone is being disruptive in the Space.
Pin tweets to Space: This feature can be used to highlight important subjects and points of your discussion.
Turn n captions while speaking: This will make your Space more accessible for listeners who might be hard of hearing or prefer captioning.
CAN ORGANIZATIONS BENEFIT FROM TWITTER SPACES?
Twitter Spaces team have been hosting Spaces to share community updates and reach its potential demographic. They vary in different topics such as hot takes in trending commentaries, related tips about the topic, and future plans. If you want listeners to actively participate in the open Spaces, you can invite personalities or influencers to talk with you or talk alone. Twitter has even introduced an option to invite up to two co-hosts in your Space, so you can add influencers as Co-hosts too.
With all these innovations on the Twitter platform, this actually resulted from having influencers in different fields have and manage their own platform for them to speak up and put insights. This is just a manifestation that Twitter Spaces really made way to gather authenticity through engagement—a new feature they can improve over time.
