Twitter Lets Users Highlight And Tweet Article Items

Have you ever wanted to share a piece of information in an article with your followers on Twitter? It looks like you may be able to do that now, with a new change implemented by Twitter. The new change allows people to highlight and share their favorite articles in a single tweet. This feature isn’t available to all outlets yet, but one in particular started what’s said to be an anticipatory trend.

Word got around about the highlight and tweet feature when The New York Times decided to try out the option last week. Their feature allowed users to highlight a sentence and tweet it out directly from their Twitter account. We’re guessing it works by linking your Twitter account up to a specific publication, similar to how Kindle lets you highlight and tweet excerpts from your favorite books.

The idea to micro blog your favorite sentences came from Times reporter Dave Itzkoff. Itzkoff explained that the idea behind the feature is being grabbed not by a headline, but by one snippet of the content in the article. Itzkoff elaborated to Poynter about how he thinks sentences can be highlighted and tweeted out: “Just a bit of educated guesswork trying to imagine what readers would be drawn to and what would make the best traveling billboards for the overall story.”

The article that Times chose to test this theory on is a feature about what’s it’s like to audition for Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels. According to Twitter data editor, Simon Rogers, “This article was tweeted 11 times more than the average of the top 500 shared Times articles from the last month.”

By using this new feature Twitter and outlets hope that more reading, and less scanning will happen, which will of course lead to more sharing than ever.

What do you think about this micro blogging feature?

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