If you know anything about social media, you know that Twitter is the place to go if you want to get something off your mind. Funny, but true! It’s the best platform for quick, relevant, newsworthy and creative information. Why? Well, for starters you only have 280 characters to get your message across. Sounds challenging but for curators, that’s a breeze. So, first, what is content curation? According to Hootsuite, curated content is content created by others that you select to share with your own audience. The definition seems simple in concept, but the execution takes a little more precision.
We sat down with Chloe Barnes, Lead Curation Standards at Twitter to learn more about what it means to be a curator and how Twitter paving the way in social media.
Dekaf Digital (DD): What’s your role at Twitter?
Chloe Barnes (CB): I’m responsible for educating the global team of people that curate moments and making sure that all of the curated work is accurately representative of the diverse places on the platform.
DD: How is Twitter evolving in the space of advertising and user experience?
CB: With a brief chuckle, she shares the only thing that is constant at Twitter is change. However, she loves that part the most!
Although Twitter is a mature company, to most people’s surprise they operate almost like a start-up in how they generate and execute new ideas.
They prioritize healthy conversations, the safety of their customers, and give global opportunities to those that want to use their platform to join in on those conversations.
This is exactly what we like!
DD: What can we expect on the horizon?
CB: Well, we’re growing! With recently acquiring Breaker, a social podcast app, we plan to introduce a lot of activities in the audio space. Additionally, we just launched Birdwatch, a community-based platform that allows customers to provide feedback in real-time, and to tag misleading information on the platform. This way issues that have been escalated will have a quicker response time which can help get a lot of the content off the platform. Talk about efficiency!
We’ve also enabled the community to be active participants in the fight against misinformation will be a huge game-changer for the health and safety of the Twitter platform.
DD: How is curation important within social media engagement?
CB: Since you’re so inundated with information on social media most find it very hard to find a community to participate in conversation with similar interests. Curation plays a part in healthy conversations on our platform by making it easy to find and understand what’s happening within the Twitter community.
For instance, anything that’s in bold on their explorer page is a trend. There’s a global team that spends all day contextualizing those trends.
In 2-3 sentences you’ll see why this is trending and then by clicking on the trend, you’ll get into a ‘Twitter moment’.
Ultimately Twitter takes the responsibility to help reduce the distortion of a lot of public conversations very seriously. As well as the diversity of the accounts they amplify in those curated moments.
DD: With all of the different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Clubhouse, Instagram, etc) what trends are you seeing?
CB: Across the board, people will continue to capitalize on telling stories. In so much that with that, those conversations are starting to become more decentralized so people can participate from all over.
So, what that looks like, is we’ll start to find more opportunities to host public conversations in different mediums such as audio.
More now than ever, Twitter is becoming more than a news-only platform. The idea is to continue to amply the voices of authors, artists, creators, and entrepreneurs in a way that a lot of other platforms have yet to do.
As we close, Chloe encourages everyone to not only get a Twitter account but feel empowered to connect with others and tell your story. It’s clear that Twitter is continuing to evolve to make everyone’s voices be heard and connect communities across the globe through 280 little characters.
