6 Tips for Making Twitter Moments
Twitter Moments are a collection of curated Tweets, assembled in a scrollable format that are great for engaging audiences and displaying visual elements. You can find Moments in the Explore tab of the Twitter app and the Moments ⚡️ tab on desktop. NPR has made “fun” Moments (Wait, are gummy bear flavors just fooling our brains?) and we’ve also tackled more serious topics (Biggest cluster ever of fatal coal miners’ disease confirmed).
Twitter provides basic instructions for making a Moment, but here are a few things that we learned during a few months of experimentation at NPR:
1. Creating a Moment consists of curating things that already exist on Twitter.
This means everything that you want to put in a Moment must already exist on Twitter before making a Moment. Fill in the gaps in storytelling by using tweets from a thread, replies, or another tweet. Is an important detail is missing? Tweet it out and add it to the Moment before publishing.
2. Think about what the cover photo for the Moment will be before getting started.
The cover photo is what displays with the Moment title and description. Images that auto-populate in link previews will not work for the cover photo. One of the tweets must include an uploaded image to be used as the cover photo. Cover photos need to be able to be cropped to 4 different ratios (1:1, 9:16, 3:4, 16:9).
3. Users will likely not scroll to the end of a moment. They get a sense of what the Moment is about, and then many of them will move on.
Moments should not be more than 10 tweets. Asking someone to view more than 10 tweets? In this economy? No way. Also, if your goal is to generate traffic to a particular story or website, be sure to include a tweet with a story link within the first couple of slides.
4. Moments are categorized by different tags, like “haha” and “weird” in the Explore tab.
It’s worth the time to spend a few minutes exploring these tags. Ask yourself: which category would your moment go into?
5. You need to think about ethics, too.
Before including a user’s tweet in a Moment, there are ethical considerations that need to be addressed. Consider, for example: When that Twitter user responded, did they give you permission to use their response? Will being included in a Moment by a major news organization or brand bring them unwanted/unwarranted attention?
6. Be true to you.
Twitter has an in-house Moments curating team. They’re very quick when it comes to making Moments for trending news and entertainment items. Our greatest successes have been when we stick to the content that is exclusive to our brand.
Sam Hoisington is a news assistant at NPR in Washington, D.C. He interned with NPR’s social media team in Winter/Spring 2018.
