Twitter is Facebooking it up: new Circle feature lets you tweet for close friends only
Who knew that the social media that became popular for letting you blurt 280-character opinions out into the world would consider enabling you to limit the crowd you could reach? Well, a new feature called Twitter Circle is now live for everyone. After a 4-month testing period, Twitter deemed it a positive change to the platform.
So, now, you can set up a Circle for yourself and include up to 150 accounts in it. Whenever you tweet, you can choose whether you want your opinions to be public or shared with your group of friends. Twitter says that users that were involved in the test were motivated to tweet more often and also got more engagement, replies, and likes from their circle of contacts.
You can only have one Twitter Circle, so you can't have different groups for work, friends, and public — like, say, on Facebook. Members of the circle can not use the retweet button to re-share your restricted posts, but Twitter does warn you to remember that screenshots are a thing. Also, if somebody adds you to their Circle, you can't really leave it — you pretty much have to mute, unfollow, or block the person if you are not enjoying the discussions.
This is not in lieu of Protected Accounts — if you have your account set to a private status, your tweets are still limited to only the followers that you have pre-approved. Then, you have the extra level of an inner Circle if you want to tweet to people that you have... pre-approved and post-approved, we guess? In any case, the feature should be available to you right now, just look for the app update in your respective app store, if it hasn't downloaded automatically yet.
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Things that are NOT allowed: