Twitter Moments - What Do They Mean For Businesses?

The 411

Moments is a tab built into the existing app (between notifications and messages) showing tweets, images, and vines etc. in order to create a richer story of existing trending news topics.

Content is taken from top news articles circulating the internet and from media partners such as Entertainment Weekly and Vogue. Users can follow Moments and get updated as a story develops, share with other users, and follow moment contributors.

Less complicated…

According to many potential Twitter users, the reason they haven’t adopted the service sooner is due to that fact they find it too complicated to use. And I do empathize; Twitter does need slightly more dedication than other channels in order to first get hooked. Well, Moments aims to make reluctant users become more attracted to Twitter. With content already curated and a user base already suggested, it could make new users feel like Twitter is the party they were invited to a long time ago, but were too scared to attend.

Bye-Bye traditional news outlets?

In this age of social media, consumers now have a thirst for information quicker and faster than ever before. Not only that, but they want control over which news they view and when. Moments act very much like a digital replacement to newspapers, with segments including news, sports, entertainment and fun. It’s a quick and easy way to view the best of Twitter, filtering out the irrelevant and focusing on the stories users want to hear about most on that day. Moments cater perfectly to Twitter’s main USP… highly contextual, real-time content, something all marketers are currently striving for. The grouping of media and content into defined and essentially ‘tagged’ categories means Twitter owns the arc of the story and, indeed, the Moment.

It will also reduce the need for users to leave the Twitter app in order to read external news stories. Rather than discovering news on Twitter and read about it on external sites, news can be broken, digested, shared and discussed all in one place.

What Moments mean for businesses?

Moments could affect the mainstream media outlets both positively and negatively - of course if they are contributing to Moments then the exposure they receive will be substantial, however with users not needing to leave the app, the contributors’ website traffic could dip slightly.

Smaller news outlets with a lesser readership and other 'digital newspaper’ publications may feel a negative force from Moments, being overshadowed by the news giants.

The roll-out could also benefit advertisers, as a new tab creates new digital space, and new digital space creates new advertising space. Although, Twitter currently has no plans to include advertisements within Moments, that doesn’t rule it out for implementation in the future.

Advertising within Moments could work particularly well for showbiz and fashion segments, with ecommerce buttons for users to purchase the fashion trends they are reading about.

Moments could also steal the spotlight back from other social networks such as Snapchat – whose Stories popularity has soared in recent times (more than one billion Stories viewed per day, up from 500 million just last year) Moments are also a very similar concept to Facebook’s ‘Instant Articles’, which was launched earlier this year.

What are your thoughts on Twitter Moments? Will you be replacing your usual go-to news outlet anytime soon?

Rebecca is a member of the DMA Social Media Council.