X has added another way to boost the visibility of its Communities element, with community admins now able to add topic tags to their groups, which will then help to highlight it in related in-app searches.
As you can see in this example, shared by X engineer Dong Wook Chung, community admins now have a new “Search Tags” element within their group settings where they can add in topic tags to associate with their group.
Admins can add up to 10 tags, which can be whatever you want, though obviously, targeting the most relevant tags will showcase your community to the right audiences.
Your chosen tags will then be used by X to highlight your community in related search queries, though there’s no definitive guidance on exactly how much of a discovery boost this will actually provide, nor how you can optimize for the exact right tags.
But adding tags will have an impact.
As explained by Chung:
“We strongly recommend that all community admins to update the search tags. Adding the right search tags will be a significant factor in search results and will make your community appear for other queries where it wouldn’t have before.”
Chung says that tags, along with other considerations, like the community’s name, its description, the number of posts in the group, moderators, all of these will have an impact on its relative search rank for those terms.
So tags won’t be the only tool to get your community to show up in search, but Chung says that it will be “a huge factor”.
Communities have been one of the key focus elements in Elon Musk’s reformation of the app, facilitating more topic and interest-related discussion to expand X usage. And those efforts seem to be having an effect. X recently reported that there are now over 350,000 communities on X, with around 650,000 community posts created daily.
That’s a lot of activity, and it could be worth checking out the topic tags for your industry and interests, in order to get a feel for what kind of discussion is happening in the app.
And if you already have your own group, you should be adding tags, as another way to improve discovery.