As a local digital media and social media Surrey based team, something we take a keen interest in here at Thunderbolt Digital is tweaks and updates to existing social media platforms, and how that might affect the management of social media accounts and how we and our clients interact with our target audience. Twitter’s addition of the new ‘moments’ tab to their UK site is something that we thought we’d put a spotlight on, not just for the breaking stories and trending topics, but also because we thought that their use of a lightning bolt icon for their new feature is a very good choice, if we do say so ourselves!
‘Moments’ is a new feature from Twitter consisting of the latest trends and news topics, collected and curated by a number of their own journalists and media partners, and presented to Twitter users in bite-size viewer-friendly links, tweets and pictures. To regular users, this may just be another update to get used to, similar to the switch of the ‘favourite’ option from a star to a heart, or the new optimised non-chronological news feeds, but this new feature is specifically tailored towards casual users of the platform in a hope to increase usage and do something about the slump in number of sign-ups that the company has seen. Many users can feel discouraged or overwhelmed by Twitter, and may think that they are only able to ‘keep up with things’ if they follow a ridiculous number of accounts or religiously search popular hashtags – ‘moments’ is an attempt to address this issue and make Twitter feel more welcoming to those who like to only check in every now and again.
So what does this mean for businesses? Our social media Surrey team believe that much in the same way that it is possible to advertise and boost posts on Facebook, Twitter is looking to eventually implement ‘promoted moments’ once the base feature becomes familiar to users, allowing commercial partners to promote themselves using the new feature. However, as Twitter are not set to monetise this feature until the New Year, only time will tell whether this will present an interesting new platform for companies to produce engaging promoted content for, or if it will merely become yet another lot of background noise that users will learn to scroll past and ignore.