Those who have been following Twitter’s attempts to solve their perceived “chaos problem” will be happy to know that “Moments” has arrived. Codenamed Project Lightning while in development, the project was tasked with the goal of making the platform easier to understand, especially for those new to the social media platform. What Moments are designed to do is group conversations and events into something readable, helping people feel they’re part of the entire conversation.
How Twitter Moments Works
Similar to a lot of other news aggregating apps, Moments is a magazine-like view of Twitter, perfect for causal users, or even those who don’t follow a single other user. In the process, they also hope to entice back the multi-millions of former users who abandoned the platform because they found it quirky, lingo-heavy and confusing. While regular users appreciate it as a rich source of global voices, many didn’t see the point.
The home screen is called “Today” and offers the sort of news mix of politics and other current events you see on a lot of other apps now available. Swipe to see other categories like sports and entertainment, and tap on individual items to find a compilation of about 10 text-only, video or photo tweets that give you more information.
What Moments is built to do is cut through some of the steps that were difficult for people to grasp, such as what or how to search via hashtags. Left swipes take you from item to item, and from there it’s possible to take the usual tweet actions of favoriting, sharing, retweeting and quoting. A nice feature: you can double tap a moment to favorite it.
Who Decides it’s a Moment
At present, the real-time stories you see on Moments are chosen by a team of about a dozen curators operating out of the social network’s San Francisco and New York offices. That will change as time goes on, with the endgame being that anyone with a Twitter handle will be able to curate their own moments. The current team does not create content, it merely organizes and presents content that already exists.
While the majority of moments are curated from what the team considers the “most engaging conversations,” others will be contributed by media partners, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed and Mashable.
Moments and Your Brand
While there is no promoted content on Moments at the, well, moment, future plans include inviting brands to curate them. Testing with certain brands is currently in the early stages and, though it’s unclear how Moments will play out in content marketing, they believe there are many possibilities for brands to capitalize on it. In the works are “Promoted Moments,” nicknamed ProMos, which include video capabilities.
Organizing and presenting content is an important part of your company’s marketing strategy. Twitter’s Moments has the long-term potential to become yet another avenue for doing so.
