This month, Twitter took a big step to increase their relevance as a news collecting platform. They reached out to news outlets to contribute to their “Moments” tab, which features one major event per category each day. Users can click on the event to find a list of the best related tweets from the Twitter community, whether they follow those accounts or not.
Wired Magazine calls Moments “a way to use Twitter for people who don’t get Twitter at all.” The new curated collections of tweets, big images and videos allow users to follow stories, rather than brands, and provide “a respite for people who’d otherwise waste time furiously refreshing their timeline.” The hope is that Moments will bring more users to Twitter and help people wade through some of the clutter to keep a pulse on “the roar of the crowd,” as it’s happening, in real-time.
It may be a little time before the full impact of Twitter Moments is felt for companies with a presence on the social media site. However, a Twitter spokesperson told Marketing Land , “With the immersive media canvas within Moments, we believe there will be many opportunities for brands to integrate content and stories in the future.”
As a business on Twitter, this new change is significant for several reasons.
What The New “Twitter Moments” Feature Means For Businesses
Image Source: VentureBeat
“Promoted Moments” premium purchase is opening up for brands.
According to Ad Week , Promoted Moments will be a “rich-media unit that can address real-time events or seasonal narratives,” allowing brands to “tell a complete story through this immersive Moments format.” Ogilvy says Promoted Moments will be “dedicated pieces of real estate… where a brand can curate a series of different tweets or Vines to actually tell their story.”
Moments expands a company’s reach to non-followers.
This is HUGE for brands! Mad Marketer explains the new feature in these terms: “Real time marketing has been extremely effective on social media. However, if you’re not following a brand you may never see their post… [Moments] would amplify the viral potential of certain posts while expanding the value of Twitter to marketers.” To increase the odds of being included at the top of a Twitter Moment, try investing extra ad dollars into Tweets around big events.
Image Source: Mashable.com
Moments gives tweets a longer shelf life.
Wired explains , “Rather than flowing off your timeline or interspersed with memes and jokes, it pulls things into a single place where you can see it—and access it again later.” Gone are the days when your most buzzworthy content gets buried by date in your newsfeed. People who are interested in the topic you’re curating can retrieve your posts quickly at any time.
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More eyes will land on your video content.
Videos in the Moments feed will auto-play, which immediately gets more people viewing this type of content. So if you’ve been putting off an investment in video production, there’s no time like the present to get this project off the ground.
Moments invites brands to inject themselves into the current moment.
For instance, a person following a particular football game feed may receive a list of related stories posted by broadcasters, NFL players, team feeds, local restaurants offering food specials, merchandisers and companies running game day promos.
Simply Measured explains how brands may inject themselves into the conversation: “As you’re moving through the different Tweets in a Moment, you can click on a specific Tweet to get more details, then Favorite, retweet, reply, or interact with that Tweet however you want to.”
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Brands will have to make room in their content calendars for breaking moments.
Simply Measured recommends “building a thorough social content calendar chock full of events that have been popular on Twitter in the past, from the more playful like ‘National Corgi Day’ [or ‘Grubbing National Taco Day’] to the more traditionally epic, like the Grammys or Oscars.”
Image Source: Simply Measured