So your business has a Twitter handle. Now what? Coming up with unique content to share with your followers can be challenging for businesses. Creating an effective Twitter presence is a delicate balance between promoting brand content and sharing others’, so that your brand is offering up its own unique material without appearing too promotional.
One way to address this is by curating content from other sources, which is a great way to position your business as a thought leader and remain active and relevant with your followers. In order to do this, you’ll need to both find content that works with your brand’s message, and figure out how you’ll use this content to add to your brand’s Twitter voice. We’ve outlined a few tips we find helpful on each of these steps below.
Finding Content
First and foremost, finding great content to share is essential. You might feel swamped in the amount of information available, and have trouble finding material that fits your brand’s message. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that help ease this process. An article on Ragan.com suggests, “4 time-saving content curation tools,” which includes:
- LikeHack. LikeHack is a tool that saves you time by aggregating, curating and delivering the top stories on your topics of interest.
- Storify. Storify collects updates from social networks to create a story format that is interactive, dynamic and social.
- Pearltrees.Pearltrees is a visual and collaborative library.
- GetPrismatic. GetPrismatic is about creating a newsfeed based on your interests. It’s along the lines of Google Reader and Flipboard.
Curating Effectively
Once you have found content worth sharing, you’ll need to think about how to best go about posting this content through your business’ Twitter. In order to make your posts more interesting, you can go beyond simply sharing by adding your 2 cents and framing the post.
For example: “Our thoughts exactly } Instead of replacing legacy systems, modernize them via @FederalTimes http://bit.ly/19jX5IA.” In this tweet, you know where the brand stands on the article it is sharing. It contributes to the brand’s voice, even though the business didn’t produce the content itself, and helps to frame the article.
At Communiqué PR, we work with a number of clients on their social media profiles. We’ve been working with our client Attachmate for several years on developing and growing their Twitter handles and finding new ways to provide relevant content to their followers. Our strategy has evolved from being very conservative and simply sharing content without taking a stand, to editorializing tweets when curating. Our client, Tom Scearce at Attachmate, wrote the blog, “For Those About to Curate I Salute You,” that offers some good tips.
We’ve outlined a few best practices to keep in mind when curating content on Twitter:
- Make it relevant. This should be a no brainer, but make sure that the content you are sharing is relevant to your followers. When selecting content, consider your audience.
- Don’t be afraid to rearrange. Just because a tweet is arranged a certain way doesn’t mean you have to keep it. You can cut the tweet down or put the link up front to encourage followers to click sooner.
- Take a stand. Add in your opinion, funny comment or provocative statement to help frame the tweet. This helps to provide context and draw followers in. Make sure to separate the editorial comment from the title of the article or retweet you are sharing. Tom suggests using the “ } ” symbol.
Curating content on Twitter is a great way to add to your brand’s online voice, and create a Twitter presence as a thought leader, not simply as self-promotional. We hope the above tips are helpful as you work on your own brand’s Twitter presence.
What tools do you use to find content for your own social media platforms? Are there any best practices for curating content that you’d add to our list?