Twitter Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Still Has Some Moments Left

With 313 million active users on Twitter, and live-streaming trending in 2016, Twitter isn't a lost cause. In fact, the ability to create Twitter Moments has just been rolled out to all users. Never heard of twitter moments? You may not be alone. It allows tweets to tell a visual story and the lightning bolt is its icon.

Hops on the Video Bandwagon

The front-runners to acquire the 10-year old social network are Google, Salesforce and Disney. Twitter live-streaming sporting events is actually rather genius, and recently streamed the most watched presidential debate in decades.

Twitter is already where breaking News happens, where memes get real and where the world (celebrities and politicians) has an opinion that is controversial.

Twitter always a place for breaking news, now in 2016 makes news for Tweets of high-profile individuals too. With live-streaming and Moments, Twitter is keeping up with how consumers use their smartphones.

Snapchat Created a Sense of Instantaneous Gratification

But as Snapchat video stories went viral in late 2015 and Instagram grabbed the idea on its dumbed-down interface (in 2016), now the Twitter Moments feature, mostly ignored and unknown to the public, are now finally available to everyone.

How to create a Moment?

If you log in to Twitter, you'll now see how many moments a user has created on the top right of the menu.

According to Twitter, 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.

Creating a Moment in Twitter is Easy

1. From the Moments tab, click the Create new Moment button.
2. Click the Title your Moment field to give your Moment a name.
3. Note: Titles can be up to 75 characters in length.
4. Click the Add a description field to type in a description for your Moment.
5. Note: Descriptions can be up to 250 characters in length. 
6. Choose Tweets to add to your Moment: 
7. From the Add Tweets to your Moment section at the bottom of the page, quickly access content to select Tweets from Tweets I’ve liked, Tweets by account, Tweet link, and Tweet search prompts. 
8. To add a Tweet to your Moment, click on the checkmark icon 

What you maybe didn't know?

• You can share a Moment Privately
• If you would like to make previously published or shared Moments visible to only you, select Unpublish Moment.
• Twitter "Moments" are not unlike the top of the funnel layers we are now seeing on Instagram and soon, Facebook Messenger. They take visual content to a whole other layer, for bite-size slide impressions for our dwindling attention spans.

Twitter Moments enable users to stick and fold tweets into slideshow-like stories that are more mobile friendly.

While Moments were intended to be a great way to summarize trending topics, they may become something else.

You can use tweets and bundle them into a theme:

• You can choose from tweets you’ve liked (or favorited)
• Pick tweets from specific accounts
• Find tweets via a Twitter search
• Add tweets directly using the tweet’s link.

Twitter Moments means you can Improve your Storytelling

While I'm not a great fan of the mobile responsiveness of the images, Moments is quite a genuine way to create an added layer of depth, creativity and imagery to themes you want to highlight and ways you can bundle content.

Though if you thought Twitter wasn't use-friendly to begin with, this feature isn't exactly streamlined. But the result is impressive, for Twitter staying relevant to the visual and video age of how social is evolving.

What do you think of Twitter Moments? Would you watch live-streamed events on Twitter? Who do you think will acquire Twitter?