While Storify makes it incredibly easy to curate a story made up of tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and more, what if all you want to do is curate content from Twitter? With Twitter Moments you can do just that: create a slideshow of tweets that tell a story that you want to share.

What Are Twitter Moments?

Introduced by Twitter just over a year ago, Twitter Moments were created as a way to showcase the "best of what's happening" on the social network. Essentially, Twitter Moments are curated slideshows of tweets.

In late September, Twitter opened up the feature to all of its users. Prior to that, only a select group of publishers and advertisers were able to create Twitter Moments. Now anyone can put together a curated collection of tweets about any topic of their choice.

The feature is a great way to tell a story on Twitter, it gives users a handy way to bypass the social media platform's 140-character limit, and it opens up a new marketing tool for small businesses and brands using social media to promote themselves.

How to Create and Share Twitter Moments

To create a Twitter Moment, go to the main Twitter menu by hovering over your profile picture on the right and clicking Moments and click the Create new moment to get started. You can enter a title, description, select tweets to add, and set a cover image or video. You can also go to the Twitter Moments page and click the Create a new moment button in the top right corner.

When it comes to adding tweets, there are four ways to you can add content to your story. You can easily pull tweets that you've liked, search for tweets by account, search by keyword, or if you already have a list of tweets you want to use, you can simply add them using their links. Each tweet will have a checkmark next to it which you will click when you want to add a tweet to your Moment.

Once you've added all your selected tweets, you can add a cover for your Moment. When you click the set cover button, Twitter will offer up any images that were included in the tweets you added to your list. If your tweets don't have images or videos, or if you'd rather use an image or video of your own, you can upload it directly to the moment.

To see the process in action watch the video below:

Twitter also has a handy guide on creating Moments that is worth checking out. Some key pieces of advice Twitter has for users:

  • Keep titles short but descriptive.
  • Choose a great cover image.
  • Use about 10 curated tweets.
  • Be sure to include photos, GIFs, and videos.

Once you've created your Twitter moment you can share it to your timeline or embed it on your site with the embed code. Unfortunately, Twitter does not provide an easy way to search for other people's Twitter Moments.

That said, when you go to a user's profile, if they have created at least one Moment, you'll see an additional tab on their profile where you can view their Moments, and how many they've created.

How to Use Twitter Moments

So why would you want to create a Twitter Moment? There are lots of situations where the feature is extremely useful.

Capture a Moment in Time: Twitter Moments are a great way to capture a 'moment' in time on Twitter. If something is happening in the news, Twitter is always a great sounding board for people to express their point of view. If you want to collate people's reactions to any given news stories, a TV event, or even a conference, Twitter Moments are now the way to go. If you're hosting an event where users are encouraged to live-tweet, creating a Twitter Moment with the most important tweets is a good way to get some extra leverage out of your event.

Beat Twitter's 140-Character Limit: Tweetstorms have become increasingly popular, particularly through a highly contentious US presidential election. If you find yourself taking to Twitter to rant about any given topic, you can always create a Twitter Moment of your tweets to make it easy for people to follow along.

Promote Your Brand: If you use social media as a marketing tool, this is a great way to showcase some of your best tweets as a brand. If you occasionally tweet about your available products or services, for example, you can collate all these tweets in one Twitter Moment where they are easy to view at a glance.

Curate Testimonials: Another way brands can use Twitter Moments is to curate testimonials from customers. Get a lot of positive feedback on Twitter and want to showcase it to your followers? You can create a Twitter Moment.

Create a Mini Tutorial: You could create a mini tutorial in a series of tweets using GIFs and/or photos, and put them in order with a Twitter Moment.

These are just a few ideas of how you can use Moments. The feature has been used in extremely creative ways as demonstrated by the examples below.

Examples of Great Twitter Moments

Twitter Moments that haven't been created by Twitter's team itself a pretty hard to come by. If you go to the Moments tab, you can view curated collections in a variety of categories: world and US news, sports, entertainment, and more. Since that tab is constantly updated, you can also follow the Twitter Moments account to keep up with the Moments that you missed.

This moment created by Jerome Tomasini curates tweets and art that Twitter users created in response to just one tweet by Jonathan Sun:

The Twitter Moment that followed was full of sketches, paintings, songs, and more.

Twitter Moments are also a great tool for those in the media. Another great Twitter Moment comes courtesy of Vox in which they chronicled reactions to the passing of Prince in April. Podcast Radiolab uses Twitter Moments to engage with its listeners on election day in the United States.

Brands have also gotten in on the Moments action. Starbucks' latest Moment takes a look at how its customers are reacting to their new Christmas cups, while Microsoft UK used the feature to showcase Black Friday deals on its products.

What do you think of Twitter Moments? How do you plan to use them? Let us know in the comments.