Twitter - Curator's Best Friend

HiveFire on Content Curation (Jul 11 2010) Social Media

1. By being a content curator, you are performing a service for your audience - you sift through the infinite ocean of content and bring the best to their attention. By helping them you are earning their trust.

   But who is helping you? Where do you find that best content?

   Millions of people share links on Twitter every day: breaking news they want their followers to pay attention to, opinion pieces they find insightful and practical advice they think their followers can benefit from.

   You can use the collective work of all these Twitter users to find the best content to share with your audience. The stream of tweets fly by and overwhelm anyone who tries to read them. 64 million tweets are created daily, and this number from early June is already outdated. How do you cut through this noise?

   The realization of the value of Twitter as a voting and annotation tool that can be used for web content discovery is not new. Services like TweetMeme scour Twitter for links and present the most popular ones on their website. There are two issues that make this approach not very practical for content curators.

   You don’t want to share old news. If you publish stories that all your readers have already seen, you are not adding much value. By the time an article is very popular, it’s too late for you to share it.

   You want to share content that is most relevant to your audience and to your chosen topic. However, the most popular links that rise to the “top of the charts” are usually general news of broadest appeal - the release of iPhone 4, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, etc. If you are curating news about scuba diving or another narrow topic that is important to a smaller well defined audience, but not beyond it, they are not going to climb to the top.

   They key is to follow the right people. You don’t want my opinion on which articles on horse riding you should read today. Trust me, you really don’t. However, you might want to listen to me when it comes to, say, computer programming.

   Almost every topic has a community of mavens on Twitter around it - trusted experts on that topic, who seek to pass knowledge on to others. A lot of stories start in the small group of mavens before they explode into broader popularity. These mavens know what is going on in the area of their interest and are likely to be the first to discover interesting articles.

   Here is a story of how one article became popular.

   The article Researchers: HFCS is much worse than table sugar was published in the environmental news magazine Grist earlier this year. It went to be tweeted almost 400 times and reached a significant audience. It achieved what Twitter calls resonance. Let’s trace how it happened.

   The author of the article was naturally the first to tweet the link to it. Shortly after that people in the community of foodies noticed the article and started tweeting it.
   Here is one of the first tweets:

   Who is Kim Severson? She is a food writer at The New York Times and a published author of a book about chefs.

   Ruth Reichl, a former editor of Gourmet and a food writer, noticed Kim Severson’s tweet and added her own:

   Soon, additional foodies noticed and retweeted. Some just pointed to the article. Others editorialized and added their comments. Here are some of these early tweets:

   From there, more and more people who followed these foodies became aware of the article.

   What can we learn from this story?

   Find who are the mavens on the topic you are curating. Follow them and watch what articles are becoming popular among them. This content is not only "safe" to share, because it's "vetted" by the mavens, but it's the most "share-worthy" content. So by sharing it, you associate with the buzz of what the mavens find relevant, and thus really add incredible value to your audience.

   This  is a guest post by Eugene Mandel.  Eugene is a co-founder of MustExist - a social content curation startup based in Silicon Valley. He tweets at @eugmandel.

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