Twitter has rolled out Circles, a new feature that’ll allow people to tweet to a selected group of followers on the platform. The company began testing the feature in May and has rolled it out to everyone globally on iOS, Android, and their website.
People can add up to 150 followers to their circle, who’ll be able to view and engage with the tweet. However, only one circle is allowed per account.
Following the update, before someone posts their tweet, they’ll see two options — share the tweet with everyone or just their circle. Twitter circles can be customised on the go while posting a tweet, and no one except the tweet author will know who is in or out of the circle.
Any tweets sent to the circle can’t be retweeted or shared. Moreover, all the replies to these tweets are private even if the tweet author’s account is public.
However, if a person included in the circle has set their account to private, only their followers who’re included in the same circle will be able to see their replies.
Also, circle members can still download or screenshot images and tweets from the circle and share them with others.
Any tweets sent to a person’s circle will appear with a green badge. This badge is only visible to the people included in the circle.
As mentioned above, only the tweet author can see who is in their circle.
While people can unfollow and block to get themselves removed from the circle, unblocking the person will allow them to add them back. They can also re-add people later even if they aren’t following them anymore. Muting the author or conversation will get rid of the circle tweets from the timeline.
From their testing over the past four months, Twitter believes that circles will result in a higher number of tweets overall and higher engagement on these tweets.
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