by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I spend a good deal of time finding and scheduling content for Twitter, but not a lot of time on Twitter.
In the last month or so, however, I did get on the site long enough to check out their ‘Twitter Moments’ feature.
Moments are curated stories showcasing the very best of what’s happening on Twitter. Our Moments guide is customized to show you current topics that are popular or relevant, so you can discover what is unfolding on Twitter in an instant.
That sounded just a little too airy for me. I found another description from Nate Swanner on The Next Web who stated:
Instagram and Snapchat have stories, which are literally the same thing. One snippet of text or media flows into the next, then it’s over.
Moments isn’t quite so hurried. You’re free to linger on a tweet or video, and scroll back through just as you would with your timeline.
Moments and Stories are the same in one way, though: you carry the narrative thread.
Twitter suggests that we “bring our Moment to life with photos, GIFs, videos, and Vines. ” They also recommend we limit a Moment to around 10 tweets.
What can we use for content? We can add tweets to our Moments from our own Twitter feed, from tweets we’ve liked or shared, or even from someone else’s Twitter feed.
How can this help us as writers? Since self-promotion is really frowned upon on the platform, we could instead compile a series that stays on our Moment. Maybe it could be a recent release (with the book cover as the ‘cover’ for the Moment), pictures from a book launch or book signing, and reviews from others or a tweeted book trailer as parts of the Moment.
Or we could curate helpful content for other writers while covering a conference: compiling tweets, videos, etc. that sum up the most helpful information that we found there.
We could have a Moment that brings together the most useful information that agents or editors have shared online.
In other words, this could be either an effective self-promotional tool, or one that can help us to network with other writers/writing professionals, or merely to help curate information for other writers. I plan on devoting more time to mine, but for the time being, I have a Moment set up for top tweets that I’ve curated on the site.
Moments are easy to set up. You click the Moments tab on your profile; click ‘create new Moment’; add a title, description, and cover; pull in content; and publish. Detailed instructions are here from Twitter.
More about Moments from Twitter here.
Have you created a Moment on Twitter? What other promo activities have you found lately?
Using Twitter Moments for Promo or Networking: Share on XPhoto via Visual hunt
I had no idea what it was about. I’ll definitely have to read the guidelines first.
It’s a pretty easy way to showcase some tweets that give a better idea of what kinds of things you’re tweeting in your daily stream. Not too much of a time suck, fortunately.
What an interesting idea, Elizabeth. It’s always nice to learn about ways to get our work ‘out there,’ without being obnoxious about it. Appreciate the info!
Hope it helps! Have a great week!
I could see how that could work very well for promotions. Adding others’ tweets to the moment means it’s not all self-promo.
Right. And it’s something that isn’t floating around in everyone’s feed all the time.