Twitter introduces Custom Timelines: How can brands use them?

Yesterday, Twitter announced another exciting development; Custom Timelines. Custom Timelines basically allow people and brands to control what tweets they want to see and showcase.

Custom Timelines can be created in Tweetdeck and they have produced a really handy step-by-step guide that you can follow on this blog post. They are very easy to create either by using a simple drag and drop technique in Tweetdeck or by using the Twitter API (however, this is only available to a small group of selected partners at the moment).

The best part about Custom Timelines is that they can be embedded on a website. This means for example if a brand is running a campaign with a particular hashtag, they can create a Custom Timeline for that Hashtag and embed it on the campaign page on the website for all visitors to see what people to saying. The Timeline is easily moderated as you can remove Tweets that you don’t want to be displayed in Tweetdeck.

So for example, for John Lewis’ Christmas campaign featuring the Bear & the Hare, they could create a Custom Timeline for the page showcasing what people are saying using #BearandHare which would look as follows:

John Lewis #BearandHare

The Guardian has already found a great use for it with Q&As, they have created a Custom Timeline for their NSA chat with their reporters which they’ve embedded in the article here.

I personally think this is a really exciting development as it makes curating campaign content on Twitter a lot easier and means it can be displayed really easily on brands’ websites.

What uses can you think of for Custom Timelines?