Content Curation for Twitter: How To Be a "Thought Leader DJ"
This is my framing post for the August 4th #smchat I moderated on Content Curation for Twitter. (Although this post breaks my rule for brevity, I hope you enjoy it!)
I actually was a successful music DJ once upon time who very early in life had the opportunity to create a very innovative club. One aspect that made the club unusual was that it pioneered multiple identities. One night, you could find a contingent of international folks for world music, on another, black leather, purple hair and tattoos for alternative and industrial music. The pièce de résistance was Saturday night which started out with vintage-clothed or black-tie revelers for the resurgence of 1940s swing music, but transformed at midnight to outlandish outfits of every type for house and techno music until the club closed at 4 a.m. What made the club successful were DJs that understood the crowd for each concept; DJs who knew what music to mix and when. I scoured the globe for music that would make the crowds roar with excitement and keep them coming back for more. A Content Curator is a DJ
On Twitter, you are mixing content, content that the audience you hope to engage will find--not only interesting--but, irresistible, irresistible enough to comment on, @reply, retweet, share, like, etc. Ultimately, you hope your followers will enlist their followers to follow you because of your great content. Some call it a tribe, but think of it as your own club, a club where you are the DJ and people come to have a good time. As a Content Curator, you should be entertaining. Those who follow you should have access to the best content already disseminated for them. You get to exchange ideas about this great content, learn something new, maybe even change your opinion. Ultimately, when your friends or followers share your curated content with their friends, THEY look smart and cool. So, how do you curate content for Twitter and become a "Thought Leader DJ"? 1. First, realize that you ARE a subject matter expert. Narrow your topic or topics to what you know well. What do you want to focus on and share? What do you already have opinions about in your industry? Whom do you know? Be specific. What should be in your Twitter "mix"? Think 70-20-10.
- Pick one MAIN focus for the content you will share. Let's say you are in healthcare, share information and knowledge related to the healthcare industry for approximately 70% of your tweets.
- Next, pick one subtopic related to your industry for about 20% of your tweets. For example, you may also be interested in "innovation" and regularly read articles/posts about bringing innovation to your industry or you may be interested in becoming a better leader and read articles about "leadership."
- Third, pick a topic that reflects some personal interest and carves a unique picture that is you. My social media mantra is "people want to deal with people." For example, you may follow hockey, or you may be learning how to knit. Limit these tweets to 10% of your mix along with random tweets.
- Use these keywords for your topics in your Twitter bio. Did you know your Twitter bio serves as a meta description and will come up in the search engines? Define the brand that is you, and people will also find you by your topics and you will have more great resources for relevant content!
2. Know your market. Who is talking about these topics? Do a "Deep Dive" to find those leading the conversation. Recently, PeerIndex launched to compete with Klout to identify influencers on the web. However, your particular industry may not be broken down into a significant enough niche to identify influencers. Find industry blogs and leaders via Google Blogs and Technorati. Follow these influencers on Twitter via wefolllow.com and tweepleml.org and subscribe to their blogs via RSS on Google Reader. Learn about their likes AND dislikes. Begin to comment on their blogs and retweet their posts. Preface the RT with your own commentary, i.e., "Interesting post!", "Great resource!", or "Like this!" Sharing your own commentary is what makes the content worth sharing.
3. Search via hashtags and alerts. Use Twitter Search to find your topic, i.e., #healthcare, #innovation, #leadership, #hockey, #knitting. Set up Google Alerts andSocial Mention to research news about your topics, your industry keywords, your competitors, your industry Thought Leaders! A great content curation tool to monitor alerts and gather content from co-workers is MediaFunnel. Social bookmarking sites like digg and delicious have their own unique communities. Recently, some very interesting new alternatives are popping up like Flipboard, and the visually cool pinterest.com. Curators are also flocking to aggregators like scoop.it. to find and curate information in their interest graph.
4. Know the "Power of Three" to effectively engage. Join a conversation when two people are already talking about a topic. Great content comes out of these conversations. So, when two people in your industry are talking about your main topic, join in by sharing a resource that answers a question already being discussed, not to promote yourself!
5. Know that how you write your tweets is just as important as what you are tweeting. Oftentimes, the original headline or tweet may not be catchy. I peruse the article/post for an excerpt that I find more compelling. It is also effective to tweet as if you are talking to one person and sharing something special.
6. Elevate your peers. Successfully curating content is not about you. Remember, you are not broadcasting. When you share news or content, add your spin about others' tweets or posts, but do it because you genuinely want to promote them and share learning. Keep a ratio of tweets of 1 to 12, one tweet about you or your post for every 12 tweets in your stream.
7. Develop good taste! Become a sommelier. Get rid of the noise. Less is more when it comes to tweets. Don't just parrot what everyone else is tweeting or retweeting. Find your own special nuggets. Dig deeper! A great tool to use to see how people are engaging with your content is visibli.com.
8. Become a valued resource to your community. What kinds of information does your community need? Share learning. Look for presentations on Slideshare and Scribd that provide valuable knowledge and best practices in your industry. Share "How To" information. Answer questions when someone is trying to crowdsource a solution. Search engines are your best friend. Know how to use them effectively to research information. Find the latest news on a topic by searching Google News, Bing News and Yahoo News. Subscribe to podcasts on iTunes and stay updated. Listen to this great podcast on Online Curation and the Psychology of Sharing by Louis Gray.
9. Be the good news channel. People gravitate more to those people whose tweets uplift them, are positive and help them improve.
10. Know "when" to tweet. When are most people in your industry engaging in a conversation? The best curated content is also timely and posted when the majority of the target market is engaging in conversations. Yes, people will retweet content later, if you are not "on", but you will get more great content by engaging when your market is actually on Twitter. A good practice is when you do find that "magic time", be consistent about being on Twitter at that same time each day, even if it is only a few minutes a day. I coach CEOs on "How to Curate Content in 10 minutes a Day." Tonia Ries from The Realtime Report offers this great toolkit on oneforty.com called "Twitter for Busy Execs." Also, it is okay to post a piece of great content again for another time zone. Personally, if I repeat content, I write another headline and I am selective about what I repeat. Another good time to post, especially about your own blog posts, is before or directly after Twitter Chats in your industry. (Do not post unrelated items that do not relate directly to the Twitter Chat as it will be considered spam.)
11. Become part of a bigger conversation. Participate in the Twitter Chats related to your industry. There isn't one? Start a Twitter Chat! Follow the people who are regularly part of the chats in your industry and find chats in this List of Twitter Chats. For healthcare and pharma, a great resource is The Healthcare Hashtag Project.
11. Become part of a bigger conversation. Participate in the Twitter Chats related to your industry. There isn't one? Start a Twitter Chat! Follow the people who are regularly part of the chats in your industry and find chats in this List of Twitter Chats. For healthcare and pharma, a great resource is The Healthcare Hashtag Project.
12. Follow industry conferences. Make a list of the conferences in your industry to follow along with their hashtag. See "Conferences & Speakers: A Hashtag is Now Part of Your Brand."
13. Understand there are differences if you curate for a global audience. Find more, see this great TED talk "Listening to Global Voices" by Ethan Zuckerman and my post on "The Global Conversation: You Say To-May-To, I Say To-Mah-To!"
14. Content Curators need to follow a lot of people. Twitter follower-following ratios are a controversial topic, and there are a lot of theories and styles which I will address in another post. However, it is my opinion, that Content Curators specifically need to have access to lots of information in order to pick out the good stuff. Although it is also helpful to set up Twitter lists to group people by topic or having groups set up in Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Hootsuite, sometimes, a great tweet will come from someone who is not on one of your lists or on your radar. A shortcut I use is to see what others are retweeting on Twitter's "Retweets by Others" column. This is not a contradiction of Number 7, because the retweets I am looking for are retweets a follower has retweeted from someone I am NOT directly following. Be open to new people and those less popular. I did an interview with Valdis Krebs, an expert in social networking, who defined "hidden influencers." These are not the people everyone is following, but finding them can produce a goldmine of content.
14. Content Curators need to follow a lot of people. Twitter follower-following ratios are a controversial topic, and there are a lot of theories and styles which I will address in another post. However, it is my opinion, that Content Curators specifically need to have access to lots of information in order to pick out the good stuff. Although it is also helpful to set up Twitter lists to group people by topic or having groups set up in Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Hootsuite, sometimes, a great tweet will come from someone who is not on one of your lists or on your radar. A shortcut I use is to see what others are retweeting on Twitter's "Retweets by Others" column. This is not a contradiction of Number 7, because the retweets I am looking for are retweets a follower has retweeted from someone I am NOT directly following. Be open to new people and those less popular. I did an interview with Valdis Krebs, an expert in social networking, who defined "hidden influencers." These are not the people everyone is following, but finding them can produce a goldmine of content.
15. Curate Twitter lists that others will want to follow. This could include a list of speakers for a conference or a list of members for a Twitter Chat. Add lists on Twitter directly or create hashtags on wefolllow.com and tweepleml.org.
16. Become a trusted resource. By now, you have heard it a thousand times: be authentic on Twitter. Make sure you also read everything you retweet and open the links. The fastest way to lose credibility is to retweet something blindly, even if you know the person well.
17. Track your results. By using a URL shortener that also provides analytics like bit.ly, you can see how many people open your links and how effectively you are curating. This can be very eye-opening. What you think is interesting, may, in fact, not be, or you just sent the tweet at the wrong time. To get this effective information, you should not use the automatic RT button on Twitter but manually retweet and redo the link with your own bit.ly. By adding a "+" to the end of anyone's bit.ly, you can see how many others opened this link. Tweetmeme is another great source.
Happy DJing!
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