How to Curate The Best Content on Twitter

By Jonathan Nuñez

 

Want to improve your visibility and brand engagement?

In this guide, I’ll teach you how to find the best content on Twitter. Content that your audience will like, comment on and share with their followers.

However, we’ll first get to the whys and hows of content curation…
 

What exactly is content curation in social media?

Content curation is using third party materials (videos, blog posts, podcast episodes, etc.) on a specific topic to share across your social channels.
 

How does content curation help?

There are many things I can say about how content curation can help you but I want to focus on data-driven points.

1. Over 50 percent of marketers that curate content say it has increased their brand visibility, thought leadership, SEO, web traffic, and buyer engagement. (Curata)
2. 41% of marketers that curate content indicates it has increased the number and/or quality of their sales-ready leads. (Curata)
3. 80% of marketers share 3rd-party content in order to improve company visibility and buzz. (Writtent)
4. Social signals are beginning to matter more than ever in SEO, which is why a content marketing strategy is only as strong as its community. (Moz)
5. The same emotions that make people share things also make people click on those things in the SERPs. This is particularly true for headlines with unusually high CTRs. (Moz)

 

Interesting, isn’t it?

 

How to find the best content to curate

If you want to find the best content on Twitter, you’ll need a content curation machine. I’ll show you how to set it up in about 1 hour and once you finish, you’ll be able to find the best content in about 5 minutes per day.

Ready?

Let’s do it.

 

Making a list of influencers and competitors

There are 8 types of Twitter lists you can use for business. But for this strategy, we’ll focus on two: Industry influencers and your competitors.

Step 1: Head over to Google and run a search for:

1. The best your industry websites
2. The most popular your industry websites
3. The most interesting your industry websites

The search results will most likely be list posts. For the purpose of this example, I’ll search for the best gaming websites.

 

Additionally, use Similar Web to search for the most popular websites in the world (or by country) and save some time. With a free account, you’ll only be able to see the 50 most popular sites but that’s more than enough.

 

Step 2: Open an excel spreadsheet and start saving all the websites on the list. Name the top cells “domain” and “Twitter”.

Step 3: Open each individual website and search for their Twitter information. You can usually find it in the header or footer of the site. After you finish, it should look something like this.

 

I recommend having a list of about 50 sites and Twitter handles.

 

Creating a Twitter list

Imagine receiving a notification saying something like “user “x” has added you to the list competitors”. Not a nice feeling right?

Create a Twitter list and name it whatever you like but make sure to make it private because if you don’t, every time you add someone to your list, they’ll receive a notification letting them know about it.

To create your Twitter list, follow these steps:

1. Click on your profile icon to show the drop-down menu.
2. Click on Lists.
3. Click “Create new List”.
4. Select a name for your list and a short description of the list. List names can’t be more than 25 characters, nor can they begin with a number. Then select if you want the list to be private (only accessible to you) or public (anyone can subscribe to the List).
5. Click “Save list”.

 

Adding people to your Twitter list

Adding people to your Twitter list is simple and straightforward. All you have to do is follow the instructions below:

1. On you are on their Twitter profile, click the overflow icon.
2. Select “Add or remove from lists”. (You don't need to be following an account to add them to your list.)
3. A pop-up will appear displaying your created lists. Click the checkbox next to the list you would like to add the account to.

 

Importing your Twitter lists to Commun.it

Lists on Twitter are good but they aren’t great. They don’t give us a lot of control over the content we see. To avoid wasting time, we’ll import them to Commun.it where we’ll have more control over them.

To do that, follow these steps:

Step 1: Click on the “Inbox” tab.

Step 2: Then select one of the people who appear in the middle of the screen (any one of them).

Step 3: A new block will appear on the right side of the screen. Click on “Add tags”.

Step 4: A drop-down menu will appear and at the bottom, you’ll see two options that say “New tags” and “Manage tags”. Click on “manage tags”.

 

 

Step 5: The link will open and you'll be presented with two options. “New group” and “Import Twitter lists”. Click on “Import Twitter lists”.

Step 6: A pop up will open asking you to confirm if you really want to import your Twitter lists. Click on “Yes” and wait (it should take about 10 seconds to finish).

 

Finding the best content

Twitter lists are super useful but the Twitter interface doesn’t give us much room to work with, it only allows us to read the latest tweets in chronological order.

What does that mean for you and me?

It’s a huge waste of our time. Let's face it, most of the time we don’t care about what people had for dinner so why see it in the first place?

Let me show you how to filter through the results:

1. Click on the “followers” tab above.
2. On the left, you’ll see a blue section. Scroll down and click on “Twitter feeds”.
3. Then on the right part of the screen, you’ll see the Twitter lists submenu. Click on it.
4. It’ll show the lists you imported from Twitter. Select the one you want to see.
5. Commun.it will show you the latest tweets on that list. Click on the magnifying glass and type the words you wish to see on the Tweet.

 

Key takeaways

If you scrolled-down because you wanted to know what they post was about or you normally arrived by reading the whole thing, then here’s a quick recap of the things you should remember:

1. Content curation can help your business increase brand visibility, thought leadership, SEO, web traffic, and buyer engagement.
2. Content curation can help increase the number and/or quality of sales-ready leads.
3. Use Google and Similar Web to build a list of competitors and influencers you can curate content from.
4. Take the people from your Google sheet and add them to a private Twitter list.
5. Import your Twitter lists to Commun.it and use it to filter through and find the best content.

 

It’s your turn

Now that you know how to use Twitter for content curation, how are you going to use it?

Will you curate content for your audience as a service? Or maybe you are going to use it to come up with new content ideas.

Let me know in the comment section below.

 

About the Author

Jonathan Nuñez is a content producer for Commun.it. He teaches bloggers and small business owners on how to use content to attract, build relationships, and acquire more customers. You can find more about him on his personal blog John’s IMSecrets. Follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube.

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