Smartphone with Twitter on the screen
Image: Digital Trends

Twitter is always changing and introducing more features, but Highlights remains one of the unsung heroes of the microblogging platform. Twitter Highlights updates users on the most relevant and trending content on their networks.

Introduced more than two years ago in Android, the feature came to iOS only a couple of months ago back in November. It is part of the ever-changing Twitter experience, which the company attempts to make richer and richer for its users every day.

The social giant is shaking things up with its live network, pushing more strongly towards advertising through Twitter Ads, betting on original content with live shows from several different partners, and signing partnerships with sportscasters to stream and cover events directly on Twitter.

What are Twitter Highlights and how to set them up

Twitter Highlights is available on the official application for both Android and iOS. iPhone users will need to run iOS 6.61 or higher, while Android users need to be running Android Lollipop, preferably version 5.73 or newer.

The feature is available in all 35 languages supported by Twitter, and it provides an excellent, comprehensive summary of what you have missed while you were gone.

Depending on how long you have spent without checking you timeline’s Highlights, Twitter shows you the most popular tweets of that period. Only a dozen or so not to overwhelm you with too much content.

To enable the feature on Android, you only need to go to your Settings menu. From there, choose to access your Notifications, and then your Mobile Notifications. Check the Highlights box, so you get a daily pop-up letting you know what you have missed.

On iOS, just tap the gear icon from your Notifications tab or your profile on the Me tab. Again, select your Mobile Notifications and enable Highlights by tapping on the slider.

Highlights displays like a carousel of a dozen or so super-sized tweets, with traditional options to retweet, reply, and like that are easy to access with just one tap. You can also return to your timeline by just clicking the X in the upper corner.

Twitter Highlights is a much more concrete and friendly option than Moments, which is also a curated selection of tweets from each account. However, out of the two, Moments gets more attention for its resemblance to Snapchat and Instagram Stories.

Moments is also a more prominent window for Twitter to exploit, which is why it is considering monetizing it with ads in between tweets. All the more reason to stick with the clean, simple, and to-the-point Highlights.

Source: Twitter