Twitter have been preparing their “Project Lightning” initiative for a while now, and now the social media giants have finally officially launched their latest update under the name Moments. This is being touted as Twitter’s most important update ever, and will serve to enhance its reputation as the best social media platform for discussing and researching current events.
Moments will appear as a new tab in the Twitter app, marked with a lightning bolt symbol. The intention of this tab is to show users the best of what’s currently happening on Twitter, with groups of curated tweets, videos, pictures and other media centred around a particular topic, such as a major news story, sporting event or special occasion. Twitter users will be able to access stories about the topics that interest them without the need to follow specific accounts or look for hashtags. Instead, they can follow a Moment and will see tweets about that topic in their newsfeed.
Twitter are hoping that Moments will attract new users who aren’t necessarily looking to spend a lot of time or energy on their account, but just want a convenient way to see tweets about the subjects that matter to them.
One of the most interesting aspects of this update is the fact that stories will have human curators from various Twitter partners such as Buzzfeed, the New York Times and Vogue, helping to give users a more human experience and ensuring that the content is actually relevant to people’s interests. The element of human input and group involvement is one of the factors that has made social media so popular and essential, so hopefully the new Moments feature will be a useful and valuable addition to the overall Twitter experience. It will be interesting to see how Moments affects the way businesses are able to implement their social marketing campaigns.