A few hours ago, Twitter launched a new feature called Moments. I see a big opportunity to use Moments in your newsjacking efforts.
Moments is a new tab in the Twitter application alongside the existing “Home,” “Notifications,” and “Messages”.
Clicking the Moments lightning bolt gets you to Twitter’s curated list of what’s important on Twitter at that moment. Within Moments are several tabs including “Today”, “News”, “Sports”, “Entertainment”, and “Fun”.
Like Google News but with a Twitter Twist
When I click the News tab, the list reminds me very much of Google News. And the various other tabs are similar to Google News tabs for sports, entertainment and whatnot.
But unlike Google News, Twitter Moments is more than just mainstream media. The great potential is finding popular stories being discussed on Twitter even before mainstream media figures out the meme.
Twitter Moments and Newsjacking
I see some great opportunity to use Moments as a way to look for quickly breaking stories that you can riff off of in your newsjacking efforts. Newsjacking is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to reach buyers directly and generate tons of media coverage.
The biggest challenge of newsjackers is finding news stories that you have an expertise to comment on and I think Moments can help with that challenge.
While we are all just getting the first look at Moments now, it seems like I’ll be adding this to my news gathering routine which now includes going to Google News several times a day.
