One of the greatest benefits of Twitter is the real-time access to valuable information. It is a great way to share everything — from new medical research to celebrity gossip.
If your business is on Twitter, followers are going to expect that you will provide them with relevant and engaging information.
Writing blog posts and guest blogging can be very time-consuming and frustrating. There is an art to producing engaging and informative blog posts that people will like to share. On top of that, posting poorly-written blog posts is often going to do more harm than good for your business.
If you don’t have the time, skill or money to hire someone to write great content on your blog for you to share on Twitter, there is another option. Find valuable content and tweet it to your followers. If it is really good, they will retweet it to their followers.
Since you’re tweeting other people’s content, you are not driving traffic to your website, but you are helping to establish yourself as someone on the pulse of your industry. This will help to increase your followers on Twitter. It will also add a lot of value for your existing followers by making it easier for them to find great content, and it will save you the hassle of constantly having to write great content yourself.
1. Build a List of the Best Bloggers
People love reading lists of the ‘best’ whatever. For almost any industry, typing in a search phrase for “best X blogger,” where ‘X’ is your industry or a niche, will return multiple websites with lists of the best bloggers in relation to your desired topic. Explore these ‘best blogger’ lists, and then build your own. Make sure to include the blogs you’ve found to have the most valuable content.
The easiest and most convenient way to do this is to collect their RSS feeds and put them in your favorite feed reader. This saves you the time and hassle of having to visit individual websites. It also provides you with the benefit of being able to search for specific topics within your feed reader.
When building a list of blogs, it is important to go beyond the big names and most influential people. Finding people who are emerging experts and undiscovered by the majority of your industry is one of the best ways to create value for your followers. You are helping them to discover new experts and ideas, while also adding value to the emerging expert by sharing their content and increasing their following.
Since this little-known blogger is not a big name yet, he or she will be more likely to appreciate you help and return the favor in the future.
2. Find the Best Curators on Delicious
Delicious is a great resource for finding great resources and information. If you’re not familiar with Delicious, it is a social bookmarking website that enables people to curate the web and share what they’ve found with other users on Delicious.
Take a look at Delicious, and conduct a few searches related to your industry. You should be able to find a Delicious bookmark that will lead you to high-value content that you can share with your followers on Twitter.
By creating a Delicious account and adding the best bookmark curators in your industry, you will have an additional source of valuable content to share with your followers. You can also find the source of the content and grab their RSS feed, adding them to your list of best bloggers in your industry.
3. Monitor Technorati to Discover Emerging Talent
Technorati provides rankings and lists of the best blogs on the web. It is a another way to find content experts and bloggers that are influential and who consistently produce great content.
Since Technorati is constantly adjusting blog rankings to reflect changes in influence and popularity, it is a good resource to check every couple of weeks and identify new and rising stars in your industry. Once you have found new and rising bloggers in your market, make sure to add them to your feed reader.
4. Build a Twitter List with the Help of Listorious
Listorious is a great website for finding influential people and thought leaders on Twitter. This website makes it easy to search a collection of Twitter lists and users by keyword.
Since you’re already on Twitter, you can also create your own list and add experts to it. If you don’t want your followers to see the lists you create, you can always make them private.
Once you have your list set up, you can check it on a daily basis and see a real-time stream of the best content shared on Twitter. Instead of having to copy headlines and links to post to your followers on Twitter, you can quickly retweet the content in your list.
This is one of the most efficient ways to discover and share valuable content on a daily basis. Hop onto Twitter, browse your lists and retweet content that you find worthy of sharing with your followers.
5. Follow Industry News Sites and Online Magazines
Online magazines and sites that cover your industry can be great resources for catching emerging issues, content and trending topics. If you happen to know the top industry news sites and online magazines, just grab their feeds and add them to your feed reader or search for their Twitter accounts. Most news and magazine sites will tweet articles soon after they are published.
If you add the Twitter accounts of industry news sites and magazines to your Twitter accounts by creating a list, you’ll have a convenient way to find content to retweet or discover articles that are worth sharing with your followers.
Finding Valuable Content to Share on Twitter
Tapping into great content empowers you not only to stay informed on your industry, but also to discover valuable content to share with your followers. By sharing the content of others in your industry who are experts in the field, you can benefit from their thought leadership and influence without having to dedicate the time needed to write your own content on a daily basis.
Have any tips on how you find great content on Twitter that we missed? Let us know!