Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast, I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about Twitter spaces. What is it? Who has it and how is it different from clubhouse? So this is a relatively new function inside Twitter. So it's not a separate app. It's not a separate platform or anything. It's inside Twitter. It's directly in at the top of your mobile device screen. And you will see where the fleets are or the Twitter stories if you don't know the terminology fleets and it turns into purple circle when somebody is on their live talking. So we discovered these a few weeks ago and we were able to jump in and join a few of the of the spaces when people were talking and hosting a space. But recently, Melanie and I were both granted the opportunity to be hosts in the beta fears by Twitter themselves. OK, so this is you know, we're we're very proud of this fact. OK, so, Melanie, what can you tell our audience about Twitter spaces in the few short days that you have been able to host?
Well, first of all, for those of you that can't understand what Esther has just said, she's just said that it's the Beta phase.
Here she goes again, never.
Quite seriously. You're quite right about the fleets, but I actually found I had access to Twitter spaces not from my fleets because I don't I don't post as frequently in fleets as maybe some people do, but I do post fairly frequently from my phone. I'm using the sort of little feather where you can add messages and in there when you click on that and you have to hold it down, you get the option to that created tweets just with text and a gif or once you've got it, use and create a Twitter space. So for some of you, you may notice it when you're going to share a fleet and for others is when you're going to share an actual tweet.
Yeah, but well, I was sort of coming at it from the "if you don't know where to find them", not "how to start one". But we get to that point now and we're getting excited. We'll get to that point. We actually hosted one the other day and we were all excited to talk about having spaces inside our space. But yeah, there's a limited number of people who can actually host the space as it was rolled out to about three hundred hosts, first of all.
So you can only have 10 people at a time. You can scroll them as you change them. I did a bit of a test a few days ago with a lady called Margaret Moloi who's trying to ascertain how it works just for the purpose of running an event which she's running today, actually International Women's Day. And so she wanted to sort of try it out with a few people to get some of the staff up there. And then she got some guests come up and down. And it was really interesting initially because as we were going through, we're kind of troubleshooting how to to use a fleet, use a space even. And, you know, it's going to be more and more people out there. They're going to be running just like they do on clubhouse, these special training days, I suppose, and how to use Twitter spaces.
Yeah. And when you go into your Twitter and it's only recently been rolled out to Android users as well, it did start just like being iOS only and Android users couldn't even see when other people were in spaces. Now they can see them. But Android users at the time of this recording are still not eligible to be hosts. OK, so that is one of the major differences between Twitter and clubhouse in that clubhouse has yet to launch being able to use it on Android. So Android users will now all jump into Twitter spaces and be able to speak in them. They'll be able to listen. They'll be able to do a lot of stuff inside Twitter spaces except start their own space. OK, so that's important to remember at the moment. I won't doubt that that clubhouse will come up with this very quickly. I know that Twitter has has beaten them to it, but we're talking today about spaces and it is audio only, which is great for people like myself, who by will by the time you know, we all know. We all remember. I know that I don't like going live on video. I don't mind doing live things. You also cannot record them as far as I know.
Yeah, like
yeah. Just like clubhouse you cannot record unless you have explicit consent. And even then I wouldn't even know.
It's just a private ruling. I'm not sure that that's even approved by. Terms and terms and conditions of actual spaces, so I would make sure we go through the terms and conditions before you start saying that, to be honest.
Yeah, yeah. OK, well, yeah, if anybody wants to go and read through the terms and conditions and get back to me on that one, go ahead. But. They started, like I said, with about 300 Beta, is that how we said beta testers?
That's the one.
That's the one I had started to roll. I took a few more people and Melanie and myself have been privileged enough to be included as a beta tester.
She's trying to avoid saying it. But she got it before
I did. I did. I was by about a week. But in fairness, Melanie got clubhouse before me. So, you know, we're sort of even. But how would you sum up the differences between clubhouse and spaces? Because in all honesty, I mean, they're pretty similar. They've got the same functionality. It's a speaker only room with people talking. Yeah.
I mean, they were a great deal of similarities. But one thing that's become very apparent, certainly when I was doing this troubleshooting with Margaret Malloy is you can only have one moderator and that's the host. And that could be a real pain. If you've got name speakers coming up and down and you've got a large audience that wants to participate and, you know, you're trying to keep the conversation flowing as well. So it might be worthy, you know, having one person managing the background. So it's not actually the physical host of the event, but it could be a member of your staff or your team who will look after the machinations in the background so that the presenter of one of these talks can actually concentrate on, you know, engaging the audience, bringing people up and down. But obviously it will be the the member of staff or the team member that will be able to actually do the manoeuvring, because I think trying to talk and engage and also do all of this might be a bit hard going.
Yeah. Yeah. For some people for sure. But like you're saying, there's also whenever you do invite someone up, there's that other.
Yeah.
Bug or functionality or maybe it's not a bug. Maybe it's just the way Twitter has done it that if you have invited someone up to speak and they check themselves back down to the audience, they can come back up at any time without getting permission again from the host.
So that could be a bit of a pain, especially if you've got people coming up and down like clubhouse. You've got people come out and down on the stage, but once they're down from the stage, they can't come back up unless they put their hand up.
Yeah.
Or a request is sent to them. Yeah. But that's not the case at the moment. But that could just be a glitch. It's still very, very early days. And one thing I have noticed what doing spaces with yourself and with other people, asking people to come up as a speaker or requesting yourself to speak, it's quite slow. Quite clunky.
Yeah. Yeah. You do need to have the most up to date version of the app. Yeah. And it is just a matter of waiting. We did notice the other day too that whenever I went back down from the audience or from the, from the stage in spaces, I could you know, there was a delay, there was the delay in the audio. I could still hear myself on stage when I was down in the audience that that was not a fun experience. But one of the good things that they do have is that anybody, whether you're a listener or whether you're a speaker, you have the ability to send emojis so you can send a clap, you can send a wave, you can send one hundred symbol, those things. You can't have that option in clubhouse. And it's a little more interactive that way for the listeners to be able to give that feedback and that, you know, it would sort of be like on clubhouse with the clapping, with the mic on and off, you know, but only speakers can do that. Only those that are in the speaking section can do that. Now, another thing to remember would be Twitter spaces will only be seen by your followers. So if people aren't following you, they won't see your space and they won't be able to go into your space to listen to or to request to speak. So it's obviously better for those that have more followers like Melanie as opposed to myself, who has slightly less. But they can follow me, so subtle. But if you are on clubhouse, then you can make a whole new audience. You can meet new people and raise your audience and your profile that way. And they can come over to Twitter and follow you there and get, you know, get in different more followers that way. So those would be some of the pros and cons of I would see personally between spaces and clubhouse.
And I would say I mean, I was actually asked on Friday in clubhouse, actually, which one would I prefer? And I've got a lot more knowledge of clubhouse in fairness than the spaces, but I actually do prefer about spaces is, as you say, it's people have to follow you to see in, OK, some people have a much larger audience than others, but I've kind of already got that rapport and relationship with people because they follow me.
Yeah, yeah,
whereas you know, I may not have connected with them fully, I don't really know him that well, whereas in clubhouse, because it can be just as world wide. But there's so many weird and crazy things in.
There are. There are. But you could also be following some weird and crazy people as well, you know, so there's there's the pros and the cons to both. Maybe we'll do an episode sometime, Melanie of like a face off a fight between the two and we get some experts said
that sounds good.
That have more knowledge and have been on each of those platforms longer. And I mean, these are brand new platforms are these are brand new places that you can but you can use. And like I said, it is an advantage now that spaces, here's me getting them confused. Now you can tell which one's my favourite and that spaces has the ability now for all audiences, whether you're Android or iOS, to listen.
Yes.
That is a major plus because that's one thing that that people have always complained about, always being less than a year have complained about on clubhouse. So let us know what your favourite is. If you're an iOS user, have you got both of these platforms? Are you using them? Are you able to go in and host your own rooms or spaces? What do you prefer with the terminology? It can get really confusing, but let us know in the comments and we would love to hear your opinion.
OK, well, that's all for now. We'll speak to you next week.
Have fun, guys. Bye.