What Twitter is doubling down on amid all the cutbacks
When Twitter Moments launched a little more than one year ago, the microblogging site was on a shaky path. Cofounder and once-ousted CEO Jack Dorsey had returned, on a permanent basis despite his divided attention, as CEO and tasked himself with refocusing the company.
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Since then, we've seen Twitter shed some of its old initiatives, such as disbanding the commerce team, canceling its annual developer conference Flight and, just last week, announcing plans to shut down its six-second-video app Vine.
Meanwhile, Twitter has prioritized live video, securing video streaming rights in sports (Thursday Night football games), politics (presidential debates) and news (Bloomberg TV).
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During this time of change, Twitter Moments remained. The project was never really Dorsey's, having been conceived under former CEO Dick Costolo. After launching with plenty of fanfare — particularly around how it could help Twitter's user growth problem — the feature faded into the background and Twitter's user growth problem persisted.
Yet, it appears to perfectly align with what Dorsey envisions for the future of Twitter. Twitter is now the "people's news network," Dorsey wrote in a leaked internal memo sent to employees last month. That followed a move back in April to recast Twitter as a "news" app instead of a "social networking" app.
Mashable met with Andrew Fitzgerald, Twitter's director of curation, last month at Twitter's New York office to catch up on the last year of the product and learn what's ahead.
What's a Moment
The purpose of Moments remains the same.
"Moments solves a problem that we’ve been working on for a very long time, which is there’s all of this amazing stuff happening on Twitter every single day, and Moments finally allows us to pull that out of the timeline, capture it, make it understandable," Fitzgerald said. "That's such a big evolution for Twitter."
Indeed, Moments is used to onramp new users. If you are logged out of Twitter or not registered, the site's homepage will show you recent Moments.
How Twitter captures that information is through a team of curators. "We came at it as we’re creating a utility service that happens to have a human touch to it, but we very quickly recognized that the skills needed to do that were the same skills in a newsroom," Fitzgerald said.
Fitzgerald himself worked as a news producer at the now-defunct Current TV and later Al Jazeera. He hired several journalists from media outlets like CNN and New York Post and looked for people with a diversity in perspective with specialities in sports, entertainment and breaking news.
Twitter declined to comment on how many staffers it has handling Moments, but it's clearly lean. There's one table of curators at Twitter's New York offices, across from a table of engineers and product managers dedicated to curation.
Twitter also has curators in San Francisco, London, Canada and Sydney on the English language team. Moments are also available and staffed locally for Spanish in Mexico City, Portuguese in Sao Paolo and Japanese in Tokyo.
Moments doesn't look like it's changed much since launch, but it's been a big year for the product. The feature has expanded to new countries — 10 markets with four languages. At launch Twitter's team was creating about 20 to 30 Moments per day, but they're now up to 250 per day.
Reflecting trends
What's trending on Twitter drives a lot of the decisions on what the team chooses to cover, yet that isn't necessarily the only criteria.
"We're looking through the world in a conversational lens," Fitzgerald said. "Each Moment is meant to reflect a conversation that's happening on Twitter."
That means that a Moment may not be trending on the network but perhaps a particular tweet gained a lot of traction.
"We have algorithmic tools that allow us to identify what large conversations are, but we're also interested in highlighting conversations that are happening that might not necessarily be the biggest," Fitzgerald said.
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In the last year, the Moments team has learned what hits and what misses, signs they have adopted into their strategy. One of the first big lessons: The best Moments aren't necessarily the most visual ones.
While Moments was immediately likened to Snapchat Stories (and now Instagram Stories), Fitzgerald noted that the text-based posts — what Twitter is traditionally known for — have the highest completion rate.
"We assumed users would mostly gravitate toward highly visual Moments. We learned actually Moments was a great way to tell stories in text on Twitter. The singular focus on each individual tweet was a stronger narrative device than scrolling through the timeline," Fitzgerald said.
The most popular categories for Moments are breaking news and trending hashtags. A Moment about the shooting in Orlando in June is the most popular one so far. For trends, #ThanksgivingWithBlackFamilies was "so good, we covered it twice," Fitzgerald said.
The future of Moments
Twitter is tight-lipped about usage numbers for Moments. Fitzgerald did not provide specifics but categorized the tool as having "grown enormously" and having "built a larger audience in one year than most major digital properties have grown in 10."
The number of visitors coming to the homepage for Moments, what the team calls the guide, has grown steadily quarter by quarter, Fitzgerald said.
For some Twitter users, like COO Adam Bain, they just keep coming back.
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In the future, Moments may no longer have its own dedicated tab on the mobile app and site. Twitter is currently experimenting with a tab called "Explore" and "Happening," which will show trending topics and Moments and could incorporate live video streams.
As for revenue, Twitter doesn't show ads in between Moments (like what you see in Snapchat Stories), but it does allow brands to pay for a "Promoted Moment." But it remains to be seen how much of a bump it has caused in revenue. Advertisers were reluctant to embrace the original $1 million price and were frustrated by the lack of metrics, Digiday reported.
When the product launched, Twitter tapped a handful of partners, including the National Football League and Mashable, that could also create their own Moments. In September, Twitter opened Moments so that anyone can contribute -- for instance, one former employee recently curated a Moment about Twitter's recent layoffs.
For now, Moments can only be created on desktop but expanding to mobile is in the works.
Fitzgerald said there are no plans to cut down on his team's own curation. In fact, they are looking to grow in new markets -- currently Twitter is hiring an Arabic language team.
Twitter is also investing more in "live" or "followable" Moments, which users can choose to follow. Selected tweets will then appear in their timelines. Twitter created followable Moments for the Olympics, the presidential election and several sports games.
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"Based on what we’ve seen this year, I think it’s the foundation of a lot more fantastic work for making Twitter the best news outlet on the planet," Fitzgerald said.
This story was updated to remove a sentence that reflected a previous component of Moments as an ad offering.
Topics X/Twitter
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
