‘Selfie decks’ are the hot new trend you’re not invited to

The quest for those sweet, sweet favourites and retweets can feel like the search for the Holy Grail. But, get yourself into a "selfie deck" — a secret Twitter community — and you'll never find yourself wanting again.

So, what the hell is a "selfie deck?" In a nutshell, a selfie deck is a group of people on Twitter who retweet and like each other's tweets to get more followers and engagement. Inside these decks, there's a strict quid pro quo rule, whereby all users have to like and retweet fellow members' posts. The decks are very similar to the concept of "Instagram pods" — secret communities trying to fight the platform's algorithmic timeline, one like at a time. Now, however, it's Twitter's new algorithm — which orders tweets according to relevancy, as well as chronology — that users are trying to trick. And, unlike Instagram pods, selfie decks are largely being created by non-bloggers who are thirsty for likes on their selfies. "They're basically a group of people who retweet each other's selfies to get more followers, likes," says 18-year-old Sasha from Texas, who has over 27K followers on Twitter. She says it's predominantly accounts with lots of followers that form selfie decks so members can capitalise on the large followings. Selfie decks take their name from TweetDeck, the tool which lets you view multiple timelines in one interface. To form a selfie deck, users create a Twitter list comprising members they've deemed worthy of including. Then, they add this list as a column on their TweetDeck interface and, hey presto, a selfie deck is born. The use of TweetDeck makes it easier to spot deck members' posts that you need to like and retweet.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

These communities are strictly invite-only, though. To join, users are usually approached on Twitter by existing members after they've been selected as someone worthy of including in the deck. "Like, someone in the group can reach out and ask if you want to join," Sasha says. Tom Bourlet — a blogger with 26K Twitter followers — says that the concept of "selfie decks" stems from bloggers' use of a tool called Triberr, which allows users to create "tribes" — or groups of fellow bloggers — who will share their blog posts. This concept is now filtering into other social channels like Twitter and Instagram, Bourlet says. "The use of selfie decks extends this out to non-bloggers, with people looking to increase their levels of engagement and reach," Bourlet says. While all these likes and retweets might sound like a dream come true, for some people it's all a bit too much. Guala Gabe, a teenager with 8K Twitter followers, was a member of a selfie deck but he says "it was getting annoying so I left." Sad times. Like all great things in life, those much-desired likes and retweets come at a price. Getting all those likes and retweets on your selfies might seem great at first, but the pressure to constantly reciprocate could become too much. To all wannabe selfie deckers: Be careful what you wish for.