The Twitter Moments feature has been slow to capture imaginations. It does not seem to have a huge amount of uptake on the more readily followed accounts, nor are your average users starting to give it a try. One would imagine that it’s safe to ignore the new tool and wait for it to disappear into the digital ether. Not likely to happen though. It seems Twitter is persisting with the feature, using it a bit itself and now making it more widely available. This is a sure sign that the tool is here to stay, so it would be foolish for brands to neglect it completely. So how does it work and how can it be exploited in order to allow brands to use it to increase awareness and bolster sales.
The layout of Twitter Moments is incredibly user friendly. You will find the function in a Moments tab on your desktop, you then click create new Moments in the top right hand corner of the screen. You are then given the opportunity to give your Moment a headline, a description and set a cover image. Then comes the fun bit, where you are able to select tweets which encapsulate the theme or moment you want to post about. You do this by browsing other accounts that have tweeted about your story/subject/feeling whatever. Search via the obvious hashtags or by use of keywords, links and even previously favourited tweets. If you want to talk about a cup final match, you would obviously search the relevant hashtags and keywords and then select the tweets which sum up the theme or feeling about the game you want to focus on. You can use multiple tweets and rearrange them in a way that tells the story of your moment. Again, with the example of a game of football you may wish to order the tweets chronologically, if they refer to the game in real time. Move the tweets using the up and down arrow on your timeline. Then there’s your “More tab” where you can add location and choose whether you want to share the moment privately or not. You can even choose your Moments theme colour and mark whether or not it contains sensitive material. The Moments tool is intended to be as immediate and as up to date as possible, if it’s news related as many of them are, Twitter recognises that you will want to update them as and when new developments form.
For your brand the Moments tab is hugely helpful. It means that you can search any hashtags that relate to any specific aspect of your brand or service. For example, if you want to shout about a new product launch or ideally if you want to display all the positive chit-chat about your latest product release, Moments lets you do this. By simply enabling you to showcase relevant content in an immediate,snappy way, Moments is essentially allowing you to run your own mini-advert, whereby you collect and promote a snapshot of your best testimonials. Considering how well consumers respond to testimonials and positive reports about brands, this is hugely beneficial. Through Moments, brands aren’t simply shouting about how great they are, they are proving their worth by presenting the attitudes and opinions of many of their satisfied customers and it is these other customer’s opinions, consumers place huge importance on.
In addition to curating a snapshot of the most positive things people have been saying about your brand or products, you can also use Moments to simply put together a list of ideas, opinions or thoughts about a range of different subjects, all of which will be of interest to your desired audience of consumers. By associating your brand with a wide range of topics and themes which relate to and compliment what you are about, you are making your brand stronger and better defined. You start to build up more of an image of who you are as brand and one that you can project outwards. You then begin creating that world, that desirable lifestyle that your consumers can buy into, through purchasing your products.
Twitter Moments, are now available to all users and look set to be sticking around, so why not get to know them and exploit their ability to promote your brand, by careful selecting tweets and pictures that celebrate who you are.
