Last year, Twitter introduced ‘Moments’ – a new addition to the platform, which was originally only available to a small number of select partners. Since October 2015, Twitter employees and certain partners such as BuzzFeed or The New York Times could curate the moments section, and although Twitter opened it up to a few more last month (including major Twitter users), it was limited to just a few.
Now, the feature is available to all. Although it is currently only available via a desktop, there are plans to make it mobile accessible soon.
Moments works like a curation board – you can select which tweets you want to add to your ‘moment’, give it a title, and others can view your board to find tweets about the subject you are sharing. Although Moments was much hyped at it’s launch, it hasn’t had the take up that Twitter was hoping. However, by opening it up to all users they are anticipating there will be more interest and activity.
You can create a ‘moment’ about anything you fancy, although Twitter does allow you to choose from tweets you’ve liked, tweets by account, tweet links or a Twitter search. You can create a header using an image from one of the tweets within your moment, or you can upload your own image. Ultimately you are creating a news page within your Twitter account. Once you have published your moment, users can then go onto your profile and view the moments you have curated.
You also have the option of embedding your moment within a webpage, and this is a great way of getting your Twitter content away from Twitter and using it within other platforms. Simply by clicking on the 3 blue dots next to the moment you have a number of options including ‘embed moment’.
If you are wondering how many tweets you should include in your moment, Twitter’s recommendation is to use about 10 tweets within your moment. This should include a variety of content such as photos, videos, GIFs and Vines, so that your viewers stay engaged.
Take a look at Twitter’s own ‘how-to’ guide Moment to give you an idea of what to include.
With the popularity of Stories on Instagram and Snapchat, this may be Twitter’s way of users being able to engage with news and articles of interest to them. And Twitter understands this. By extending this creative format to everyone, Twitter says they’re “giving people a new and dynamic way to tell their stories.” And “Moments allows us to collect and curate Tweets to tell stories in new ways. It’s a powerful Twitter feature, continuing to help build community as we engage specific topics and events.”
Twitter's global curation lead Andrew Fitzgerald told Mashable in an interview earlier this year; "We think of Moments as an extension of content discovery on Twitter, beyond the search function."
It is still unclear how Twitter will curate all the moments that will be created within the moments page, or even how you get to see the ones you want to see, but it seems that the trending subjects will be higher in your feed, along with accounts that you follow.
We will be watching with interest. What do you think? Have you used Moments yet? Let us know by tweeting us @Cosmic_UK.