Twitter rolls out Topics feature in India

Twitter on Thursday announced the launch of Topics in India.

The Topics feature will be tailored for Indian users “making it easier for Indians to find, follow and talk about their interests”.

“Topics let people follow specific subjects of their interest, allowing them to see more content on these subjects on their timeline,” Twitter said in an official release.

Users will see tweets from a range of accounts on the topics that they choose to follow.

The microblogging platform has rolled out the Topics feature for Indian users in English and in Hindi, “the most used Indian language on Twitter in India.”

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“Within a Hindi Topic, people will be able to see tweets in Devanagari script, as well as Hindi speech, typed in the Roman alphabet,” Twitter said.

Some featured Hindi Topics for India include cities like Agra (आगरा), Patna (पटना) and Pune (पुणे), general interests like Animals (जानवर), Horoscope (राशिफल), Poetry (कविता) and Technology (प्रौद्योगिकी), Sports (खेल) teams and individuals, along with entertainment Topics like Movies (फ़िल्में).

Topics in Hindi will only be available to users whose device settings are in Hindi.

Manish Maheshwari, MD, Twitter India, said: “India is an important market for Twitter. We want to strengthen the service’s value for Indian audiences by giving them more control over what they want to see on their timelines. Topics will allow people to engage with content they love and find people with like-minded interests, empowering them to choose their feed.”

How does it work

Users can follow a particular topic on the Twitter app on Android and iOS. For this, they can select the ‘Topics’ option by clicking on the icon with three horizontal lines on the top left of the app. From there, they will see a list of ‘Suggested Topics’. They can tap the ‘Follow’ button on the topics that interest them. They can also explore a wider list of topics by clicking on the ‘More Topics’ option at the end of the list. Users can also find Topics to follow from the Topics Selector page.

Users can also unfollow a particular topic from the ‘Topics’ section on the app.

To share a particular topic, users can tap on the new share icon on the Topic’s page. It will let a user send a link to the Topic in a Tweet, direct message, or outside of Twitter.