Here’s Your Down-to-Earth Guide to Twitter Moments

In order to catch up with its main competitors – Facebook and Instagram – that are revolving around the multimedia trends and visually-oriented content, Twitter adopted a similar solution by introducing Twitter Moments in late 2015, which was a slightly different direction for them. Many business owners haven’t fully explored Twitter Moments yet, but they are very easy to use, which you’ll find out in just a minute in this guide to Twitter Moments.

By adding a story-friendly section to a platform long known as a business and information-oriented one the guys at Twitter took a risk because, unlike Instagram or Facebook, the social network in question was never a place for games, multimedia, galleries, and entertainment. But with Twitter Moments, users have new ways to explore these things.

What are Twitter Moments?

Twitter Moments were introduced by Twitter in 2015, one that allows users to curate stories from a range of topics such as Sports, News, and Entertainment. At first, only the social network and its partners could use Twitter Moments. The addition went live shortly after Snapchat Stories release. Later, in 2016, the target group widened by allowing influencers and creators to have access to it too. A month after that, Twitter Moments officially became available to all Twitter users – this happened on September 28th, 2016.

The main idea of Twitter Moments was to make the tweets more storytelling-friendly. Twitter was and still is built with a professional purpose in mind that, unlike Instagram or Snapchat, didn’t focus much on imagery and visual stories. Twitter means information, business promotion, and news. Adopting this new feature made Twitter more flexible and open to what seems to be the new marketing trend: multimedia (video, animation, storytelling).

Just like Insta Stories, you can use this feature to share moments of various activities and topics by presenting them in a succession of related tweets. You can think of Twitter Moments as mini storytelling posts so, instead of publishing a single tweet, you can put together more of them in a progression style.

Twitter, a more narrowed social media platform when it comes to multimedia display, came up with these Moments in an attempt to catch up with the last two years’ visual expansion. If you take a look at its social media competitors, you’ll realize that all of them have already adopted this feature that facilitates people’s engagement with the trends.

But that’s not all. It’s not only that you can create and tweet Moments, you can actually use them for advertising. Subsequently, Twitter expanded the feature into Sponsored Moments, which aimed to help marketers give a boost to their businesses. The Sponsored option is still available and includes interstitial tweets of the company and a branded cover. Through Sponsored Moments, you make an agreement with a partner to integrate your brand into their Moment and promote it to their specific audience, which is beyond your own number of followers. This type of advertisement is called In-Stream Sponsorship because you pay a premium publisher to sneak your brand among the tweets they add to their Twitter Moment.

Apart from Sponsored Moments, which were added this January, there’s also the Promoted Moments option that was released right after the initial launch of the Twitter Moments in 2015. Just like sponsored advertising on Facebook, you pay a fee to display your Moment as an ad in people’s newsfeed based on a specific target audience.

How to create a Twitter Moment

It’s actually very easy to add a Twitter Moment, it requires a few intuitive steps, which I am going to show you now. So let’s create one together.

Go to your profile and click on Moments (you can find it in the same menu with the Likes, Lists, and Followers). A button saying Create New Moment will appear right away, as you can see in the image below. 

In a new window, a small editor will ask you to write a title, a description, and set the cover photo of your story. Below these three requirements, you can choose what tweets to add to the Moment. You can actually add a mix of tweets that you can select from those you created yourself and tweets published by others (you can search by one’s profile). If none of these options works for you, you can either search for a specific tweet – in case you know the words – or link to it directly via the same content box.

Now, if you’re going to stick with one of the first two options, you’ll be given a list of many tweets from which you can select the ones you want to appear in your story. Just scroll and add the tweets you find relevant to your post by clicking on the check sign near the respective tweet.

After you mark a tweet for inclusion, it automatically disappears from the list and is added to the top of the Moment (under the cover). Here, you can make slight adjustments like changing the order, cropping the image to fit the mobile screen, or removing the tweet if you changed your mind.

When the Moment is ready, click Publish (top right of the page). If you want to wait more or you don’t have the time to publish it right away, you can click on Finish Later and the Moment will be saved as a draft.

After the publication, it will appear in the newsfeed like a normal tweet. It’s just that when they click on it, your followers will see a separate window with the gallery/timeline you created. They will see the same page and design that you saw when you were editing the Moment. They will basically see the gallery of tweets you’re showcasing.

Based on your purpose, you don’t necessarily need to tweet the Moment. If you create it more for your own use and not for people, you don’t have to tweet it and it won’t appear in their newsfeed. You can just publish it and leave it there in the Moments tab. Only those who enter your profile and click on the Moments tab will be able to see it. So it’s up to you if you want to share it or keep it on your profile for personal purposes (put together your favorite tweets from an event you enjoyed, a place you loved, or a topic that you’re interested in particularly).

Things to know about Twitter Moments

Before creating Twitter Moments, you should learn how they work so you can streamline the process and get the most out of it.

Check out these interesting and useful facts about Twitter Moments that will help you get the most use out of them:

They are a collection of tweets (only). You can’t upload images, GIFs, or other files from other sources. You just have to put together your favorite tweets or the ones you find relevant to a story. So a Moment is composed only of tweets and nothing else.

Any public tweet can be used in your Moment. There are no restrictions when it comes to which tweets should you use or not. You can pick a tweet from someone who doesn’t follow you, whom you don’t follow, or both at the same time. It’s up to you.

Moments shouldn’t be too long. Twitter recommends a maximum number of 10 tweets per post so that it won’t be too short or too long.

The optimal Moment contains a variety of tweets. If you have tweets with images, videos, or GIFs, try to alternate them so they won’t display the same format two times in a row. This way you keep your readers more engaged with your story. Diversity gives your content continuity.

Moments can be followed. If you see a Moment that interests you and want to see more news related to that specific topic, you can simply follow it (it comes with a Follow button by default) to see the updates. Once the Moment is complete and the owner stops adding new tweets, you won’t see any activity related to that Moment anymore.

There are engagement statistics for each Moment. Go to Moments on your profile page and you’ll see both the published ones and those that wait in the drafts. Each one has a down arrow that once clicked displays various options. Hit View Analytics. Once there, you can monitor the numbers associated with the Moment you’re checking: the total number of opens and the unique opens (unique users), the likes, shares, and the completion rate (this tells you if a user scrolled to the end of your Moment or closed it before reaching the last tweet).

Any tweet can be added to a Moment right from the newsfeed. If you scroll through your news homepage and see a tweet that fits the topic you want to include in a Moment, you can click on the down arrow of the tweet and select Add to Moment. You’ll have the option to add it to an existing Moment or create a new one.

How to use Twitter Moments for marketing purposes

An important question to ask would be “Why should I use a Twitter Moment in place of a normal tweet? What can I share via Moments that cannot be shared via regular tweets?”

I asked myself the same question because the utility of something is what makes us want to try it or not. Well, there are a few situations when Twitter Moments can be a better choice than a simple tweet. With Twitter Moments you can:

Summarize a conference. All of us who work in a team and travel to various conferences can use Twitter Moments to put together all the tweets our colleagues post during the event. It can be a good thing to do for internal fun, brand awareness, future blog posts, you name it. It’s way easier to tell the story of an event with Twitter Moments.

Create a roundup. Roundups are one of the most popular content formats on the web. They’re easy to follow and straight to the point. So putting together your company’s achievements, the highlights of a match, people’s reactions to a political decision, the news of the day/week, or images from an adventure will be good for promotion.

Promote your products. You can use a Twitter Moment to showcase people’s testimonials or tweets that talk about your products. After you launch a new product, a collection of tweets from various clients will provide the social proof your brand needs to thrive.

Tell a timeline story. While we are gone on holidays, we tend to post on social media the beautiful things we see along the way. One tweet here, one tweet there, and this is how you can create a story. When you’re back home, you can create compilations and add the best moments of your vacation by days, chronologically. But this is just one example, you can also tell a story on how your team worked on a great product that is about to be released. And remember, you still need to follow professional social media etiquette with Twitter Moments.

Promote your blog posts. You can use Twitter Moments to create recurrent collections of your latest blog posts. This kind of collection would be something similar to a newsletter, whose audience is your Twitter followers base in this case.

Support a cause. You can use people’s testimony to support a cause you’re standing for. If you work for an NGO, Twitter Moments could help you gather valuable information and build emotional stories around it.

Last but not least, pay for sponsored content.  No matter if you want to promote your own Moments or want to get featured in other big players’ content, you have options to advertise your brand either way. According to Balaji Srinivasan, Twitter Moments have around 92-139 million mobile unique views per month, due to the users that enter the Explore tab when browsing via their phones.

Final thoughts

This guide to Twitter Moments covers the most common business uses for Twitter Moments, but with a little creativity I’m sure you can adapt Twitter Moments to suit the needs of any business. By using the strategies in this guide to Twitter Moments, you can put back to back similar tweets to give your business a new boost, share your blog posts, create memories, or promote a product relying on clients’ testimonials.

By Adelina Tuca