How to Find Great Content to Share on Twitter

What content are you sharing on Twitter?

Do you struggle to find interesting, relevant things to tweet about every day?

In this post, I’ll show you how to curate content your followers will love so you can build a loyal community on Twitter.

Why Curate?

Today most marketers understand the need to create informative and relevant content. But it’s equally important to curate informative and relevant content.

In addition to creating great content for your site, the links to the other people’s content that you share on Twitter also matter.

When you share good content on Twitter, the kind your audience loves, it’s easier to build a strong community. And sharing great content will also increase your credibility in your industry.

retweet
When you create and curate relevant content, people are more likely to retweet and share your stuff. Image: iStockPhoto

#1: Know Your Audience

So what content should you share on Twitter? Before you can determine what is the best content to share in your social updates, you need to dig deep and go inside your followers’ heads.

You’ll want to know your social media audience. What keeps your ideal follower up at night? What are his favorite blogs? What’s the first thing that pops into his head when he thinks of you?

If you’ve ever created a buyer persona for a marketing campaign, this is the same exercise.

You want to find the intersection of what interests you and what interests your audience.

You can also ask your followers to find out what they want. You may find general open-ended questions—such as “What would you like me to tweet about?”—too broad to give you the information you need.

Instead, ask your followers a multiple-choice question such as, “Would you like me to tweet about a) social media marketing, b) mobile, c) productivity hacks, d) all of the above?”

You can use their answers as a starting point to plan the content you share and identify what your followers want from you.

Once you identify the content your audience is interested in, commit to this topic. Don’t dilute it.

For example, Social Media Examiner focuses on social media. So you’ll find articles about generating email leads using social media. But you won’t find content devoted to increasing email open rates or the perfect auto-responder series or other topics with no connection to social media.

Find out what topics interest your audience most and share content related to these topics on your social profiles.

#2: Tools to Help You Curate Content

Once you know your audience well, you’ll want to set up a good aggregation tool to find content worth tweeting about.

Here some of the popular news aggregators in the market today. Use the ones you like for your business to find the content you need to provide a valuable stream of daily tweets for your followers.

Feedly – Your News Delivered

Feedly is a tool to help you curate content. Feedly makes it easy for you to look for the articles most relevant for you to share.

One of the best aspects of Feedly is the variety of viewing interfaces available. You can format it to show articles in an email-type layout with headlines or arrange them as image cards or also choose a more traditional magazine layout.

Feedly is a great alternative to Google Reader and offers a variety of layouts to make RSS more enjoyable.

Regardless of the layout you choose, Feedly shows you new content from the blogs and news sources you subscribe to. And it offers a consistent presentation across devices, so you can tweet from your laptop, your tablet or your smartphone.

One of my favorite features is Feedly’s integration with multiple online tools such as Google+, Evernote, Buffer, Instapaper and more. This makes your content curation easier.

You can share and save your favorite articles to multiple social networks and web tools.

Fever – Find Out What’s Hot

Do you want to know how hot the story is that you shared? Fever is a content feed reader that ranks the stories in your feed with a temperature gauge. This allows you to measure how many links and shares a story has within your network.

Fever is a paid service that reads your feeds and picks out the most frequently talked about articles from a customizable time period.

This is a visual way to see how the content you share on Twitter resonates with your audience. It’s an easy way to be sure the content you share matters to your followers.

It is important to note that Fever comes with a one-time price of $30 and you need to host the files on your own server.

The setup is a bit technical, so you may want to ask your IT department to help you get started.

Prismatic – Discover New Content to Share

While RSS readers are great for keeping up with your favorite blogs, Prismatic helps you find new and interesting blogs.

Prismatic delivers socially curated content based on your interests to help you discover new blogs and content sources.

If you like to keep your content curation fresh and interesting, Prismatic does a great job of introducing new blogs and content sources you may never have come across otherwise .

Here’s how to get the most out of Prismatic.

Step 1: Sign up

Sign up for Prismatic using your Facebook, Google+ or Twitter login, or create a stand-alone account on Prismatic.

Sign up at GetPrismatic.com.

Step 2: Choose Your Interests

After you sign up, you can pick the different topics that you and your audience relate to. As you use the service, Prismatic will suggest new topics based on what you share and click.

Find new content by choosing topics your community is interested in.

Step 3: Pick Your Favorite Publishers

You can also use Prismatic as an RSS reader. Under the Favorite Authors section, add your favorite blogs and publishers to Prismatic.

Add your favorite blogs so you won’t miss a thing.

Step 4: Share Your Curated Content

After you’re all set up, share the articles your audience is interested in reading.

It’s easy to share the content you like from Prismatic.

When you share content, remember to include the author’s Twitter handle, so you can introduce your followers to new and interesting people.

And be sure to include relevant hashtags, but don’t overdo it. Buddy Media reports that tweets with one or two hashtags receive higher engagement than those with three or more hashtags.

Prismatic has good sharing features and can help you share great content with your audience.

#3: Analyze and Repeat

One of the most important steps to curating amazing content is to measure the results.

Are there certain articles that get more clicks, retweets and favorites than others? Is a certain topic or interest driving more engagement with your followers?

You can use Buffer to analyze shares, but management tools like HootSuite, SproutSocial and TweetDeck can all provide good analytics on your tweets.

These tools help you analyze metrics such as the number of clicks, retweets, favorites and potential reach each individual tweet receives.

Track who retweets your content and the reach they have.

Use this data to see what really resonates with your audience and A/B test different headlines for your content. Here’s an example of results from two different tweets promoting the same content.

The example above shows how a simple product mention can help spread your content to a greater audience.

Be sure to measure the response to different headlines to see which one interests your audience most and learn from your results.

Share the Content Your Audience Loves

With the wealth of information that exists on the web, marketers have a harder time finding great content to share.

Use these tools and tips and you’ll not only discover content that you enjoy consuming, you’ll also find content that drives greater engagement with your Twitter following.

What do you think? Did I miss any great tools? What are your favorite tips to curate content? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Images from iStockPhoto.


author: Steve Young
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-find-great-content-to-share-on-twitter/

5 Tools for Turning Social Media Relationships Into In-Person Connections

Social media can be applied to all kinds of activities, including staying in touch with relatives, getting advice, and playing games. One type of application that is growing is the development of in-person relationships resulting from connections originally built exclusively on social media platforms. Building connections in person is incredibly important despite the rise of social media, according to Ed Keller and Brad Fay, co-authors of The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace.

Keller and Fay’s research uncovered that in the United States, 75% of conversations occur in person, with less than 10% occurring via social media. Their data also showed that, on average, in-person conversations are thought to be more credible, and often skew more positive than those conducted using social media.

Of course, it’s not always easy to manage the transition of a social media acquaintance into an in-person friendship. Here are a few tools that can help make that happen.

1. Lanyrd

Lanyrd, a social conference directory, is a great way of finding out where your social media connections will be so that you can arrange to meet up. The site allows you to sign in with Twitter and then see Lanyrd’s list of suggested events you may be interested in. To help you build connections with your Twitter friends, there’s a “from contacts” tab that lets you see all of the events your contacts have said they’ll attend. A glance at this list will show you which events will be more conducive to making more in-person connections.

Next to each conference or event, Lanyrd offers two main buttons: “Attend,” to signify you’ll be in attendance, and “track,” to bookmark an event and keep tabs on it.

2. LinkedIn

While it’s not too uncommon for a Twitter user to follow thousands of other users, social media practitioners tend to be more selective on LinkedIn and Facebook. Inviting a Twitter acquaintance to connect on LinkedIn or Facebook is often seen as a move towards a more formal relationship.

“I often ask fellow #LikeableChat participants to [join me on LinkedIn] after we chat. It solidifies the connection,” says Valerie Pritchard, a research coordinator and writer at social media marketing firm, Likeable.

For many, LinkedIn is an incredibly useful tool for building and maintaining professional relationships, providing access to plenty of information about someone, such as shared alma maters, mutual connections, and similarities in work histories, leading to opportunities for bonding.

3. Banjo

Banjo is one of the fastest growing mobile platforms used to maintain and develop in-person connections. In April, the service announced it had slightly more than 500,000 monthly active users, with total membership hitting 900,000.

Banjo can find your connections across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and it alerts you when your contacts are within a geographic interval of your choosing. This makes it incredibly easy to arrange spur-of-the-moment meetings with online acquaintances.

Banjo is also great if you’re planning a visit to a place where you don’t have many friends. You simply tell Banjo where you plan to be, and it will load a map indicating where your online friends (and other Banjo users) are in the vicinity.

4. Sonar

Similar to Banjo, Sonar is a mobile app that lets you check in to physical locations and know when your social media contacts are at the same venue or nearby. One key feature of Sonar is letting you know when your friends’ friends are nearby as well, revealing connections you might not have otherwise made. With Sonar, it’s not uncommon to check in to a busy venue such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and find someone with four Facebook friends, two LinkedIn connections, and dozens of Twitter followers in common.

Sonar usage is particularly heavy in fields such as digital marketing and among communities such as parenting bloggers, in which people usually form strong connections online before ever meeting in real life. During conferences where these communities come together in person, Sonar is very useful in making sure users don’t miss the people they really want to meet.

5. Meetup

Of course, going to a meetup is a great way to meet some of your online friends in real life. You can do this by setting up an account on Meetup.com, and linking it to your Facebook account so you can see where your friends will be. You can flesh out your profile with specific interests, which lets Meetup improve the meetups that it suggests to you, or you can simply search by keyword. Meetups are organized for all sorts of interests from politics to botany.

Of course, Meetup.com isn’t the only way to strengthen relationships made online. Google Groups is a very useful choice when it comes to organizing a tight-knit community and planning in-person meetings.

What’s your favorite way to turn your social media connections into actual in-person friends? Have your say in the comments below.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, IsaacLKoval
Author:Jeremy Goldman
Source:http://mashable.com/2012/06/25/social-media-friends-real-life-connections/