How to Use Twitter, Facebook and Formstack to Curate Content, Provide Better Experiences and Filter Noise
As an information professional, you read and share lots of Web articles just to keep up with trends and gain competitive insights.
You Tweet the stories you like and find useful, and your followers occasionally re-tweet them (RT).
How can you improve this process and gain more value from it?
Here are some tricks or best practices. First you want to analyze which articles are getting the most RTs and interest. The key is to let your followers show you what articles are the best/most popular/useful. . . then make sure you leverage that data.
This can be as simple as tracking your RTs (via @mentions) in a tool like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or Seesmic. If you’ve been sharing a lot of articles, you’ll instantly see how many people thought your links were useful.
You can also get more “into the weeds” by using Bing (yes I said Bing.. not Google). Bing search results are uniquely tied into Facebook. If you’re logged into Facebook and perform a keyword search on a fairly recent/relevant topic (I tried “Facebook marketing” to turn up some results within my particular social network), you’ll see articles and search results that include the photo and “like” status from people you’re connected with on Facebook.
Once you’ve identified some popular articles from your Twitter or Facebook streams, you’ll want post the popular ones to Facebook. IMPORTANT: You don’t want to test article links in Facebook like you would on Twitter (that’s why you use the Bing search strategy). Facebook shouldn’t be getting so many posts in the first place. Posts on Facebook need more “breathing room” than Twitter. <a href=”http://www.hubspot.com/archive/the-science-of-retweets-social-media-marketing-webinar/”>Dan Zarrella had a great webinar on this recently for Hubspot</a>.
Next, you want go back to Twitter and change some of the article titles but keep the same links. I like to schedule these in Hootsuite. This way, I can take a couple hours every week to line up a bunch of Tweets at optimal times.. then I’m done for the week.
You can also pull quotes from the articles and use those as the text of your tweets. Change the shortened link for the article (with an alternate shortener, like goog.le or bit.ly) if you see that Twitter is blocking “same tweets.” You’ll want to schedule the same article in different forms throughout the week/day (only on Twitter, not on Facebook).
Next, you’ll want to create poll questions based on the topic/article you just crowdsourced. Use PollDaddy, SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Formstack or some other tool. You can link to these polls and publicize them on Twitter/Facebook and use them on your web sites, of course.
The key is to let your audiences teach you about what’s most important to them. The more you learn, the better you become at spotting trends, delivering the right content and establishing yourself as someone with their finger on the pulse of a particular industry/topic/trend.
