If you’ve been trying to hop onto the “social audio” wagon, you’ve definitely heard of Clubhouse. It has been an invite-only network (currently on iOS), which saw a rise in popularity during the pandemic even though it launched in 2019. That popularity caught the attention of the other networks who began working on their own version.
Twitter began testing their own version since December and slowly expanding their pool to iron it out before a stable release to the public.
Twitter has now begun the worldwide rollout of their Clubhouse-like Spaces product. That means people across the Middle East and North Africa region and South Asia now get to host their audio conversations live.
An added note: I got access to Spaces near the end of April on my Samsung Galaxy S20 FE (didn’t reflect on my iPhone 11).
Getting Started with Twitter Spaces
The minimum requirement is that a Twitter account needs to have more than 600 followers. The reason behind this number of followers? Twitter mentioned in their blog post that “these accounts are likely to have a good experience hosting live conversations because of their existing audience”. That applies to any individual or business (i.e. brand) account on the platform.
Just clicking and holding the compose button will bring up the option showing the new Spaces icon. Then you just have to follow the prompts to start your own Space. All Spaces will be viewable on the top of the app in the same area where Fleets are shown, distinguished by a purple bubble around them.
As we’re nearing the end of Ramadan, it’s a good marketing opportunity to capitalize on the remaining days leading up to Eid. Expect to see many brands across the MENA region hop onto the opportunity.
Note that the global rollout only covers Twitter’s native mobile apps on iOS and Android (they’ve beaten Clubhouse to Android, who are still testing out their app). There has been word that Twitter is testing Spaces on desktop/laptops via web browsers, and we may see that bear fruit sometime in the near future.
Future of Spaces
Looking further ahead to leading the social audio segment, Twitter is planning to bring more features to the Spaces product:
- Multiple co-hosts with other people when hosting speakers and participants. This will also help you appoint another host should you have to leave the Space
- Ticketed Spaces, allowing hosts a monetizing option. Hosts can set the amount and how many tickets they want to sell; the majority of the revenue goes to the user and Twitter takes a small cut from it.
- Schedule and set reminders, which will greatly help in marketing events in advance
- Accessibility improvements with live captioning
- Discoverability of Spaces as they happen
If you’re wondering where to begin on using Spaces, Twitter has also published a help guide to explain Spaces accompanied with FAQs. If you have access to Spaces, start using and building out your community.
