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How To Improve Your Writing Skills With Twitter

Posted: 12 Feb 2014 04:53 AM PST

This is a guest post by Alvina Lopez.

Twitter has proved itself to be a useful tool for marketing, business, and networking for several years now.

Even those late to hop on the bandwagon can attest to the usefulness of the web tool and networking site. As a mini-blogging platform, Twitter originated as a social networking and social sharing site, but quickly evolved into a marketing and promotions tool to reach millions throughout the web.

While social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have received a considerable amount of criticism, there are many things these sites have done for us. One might be surprised to learn the writing benefits Twitter can teach any writer who aspires to inmprove.

How To Be Concise

Many argue that the character restrictions things like Twitter and text messaging impose on people is damaging to their writing development. However, this limitation can actually be a very useful tool for writers and can help instill a very important writing practice.

Concise writing is essential. Talented writers are those who can get across what they need to say with as few words as possible. Of course, with creative writing there are certain creative liberties writers can take, but, for the most part, strong professional writing is concise.

By being limited to 140 characters, we are forced to be concise and brief. Business writing values saying what you need to say quickly. Twitter encourages and cultivates this skill.

How To Read Your Audience

Twitter is a public writing experience. That’s the point. People are supposed to post things on Twitter that they would like to share with their followers. In this way, Twitter is very much about knowing who you are talking to.

By getting response to what you write within a matter of minutes you get immediate feedback and quickly learn how to read and cater to their audience.

In business writing and even conversation you want to know and understand your audience. Knowing who you are talking to and what it is they would like to hear from you helps you create material that appeals directly to them.

Twitter helps you practice writing for a specific audience and the better you are able to develop this skill the more retweets and followers you will get.

Learn How To Be Direct

While directness is certainly an aspect of being concise and brief, there is much more to the art of direct writing. Business writing values a style that is direct and demanding.

With Twitter you can Tweet at people and direct individuals’ attention directly to your post. This demanding aspect of the platform speaks well to business writing values.

You want to direct your reader’s attention to your message. Be direct and up front about your purpose and what you wish your reader to do.

Proofread, Proofread, Proofread

While there are plenty of examples throughout the Twittersphere where people have failed to proofread and edit their Tweets, the platform does encourage that you look through your writing before you “publish” it.

This is an essential lesson for business writing and other writing alike. You must proofread and edit your work. Unedited and incomplete writing is unprofessional and considerably less effective on your audience.

Conclusion

Do you think Twitter has made you a better writer? Let us know in the comments below.

This is a guest post by Alvina Lopez is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges.

The post How To Improve Your Writing Skills With Twitter appeared first on Make Money Online With Twitter Marketing.

How to Speed Up Your Content Curation Process

Posted: 12 Feb 2014 03:00 AM PST

Cas McCullough

By Cas McCullough
Published February 12, 2014

Do you want to share helpful content, but don't know where to find it?

Are you looking for tools to speed up your content curation process?

In this article I'll show you how to find and share relevant content in a snap.

Why Content Curation?

If you want to be the go-to expert in your niche, you need to provide more value than the other guys. Content curation—sharing relevant articles from several sources—is an important way to provide that value to your clients, fans and readers.

Modern marketing has changed significantly. It's less about promotion and more about helping your ideal clients make informed decisions. Buyers expect to be fed relevant and helpful information.

Good content curation pinpoints potential clients' needs, wants, desires and problems, then offers answers and solutions. Sharing other people's content is a great way to quickly become the recognized expert in your field.

It can take a lot of time to find and evaluate content that's good enough to share. What if you could save that time and use it to be more productive? Keep reading because I'm going to show you my favorite content curation tools—Feedly and If This Then That (IFTTT)—and explain how to use them together to make content curation much easier.

#1: Use Feedly to Find Articles

Feedly is an awesome tool for finding timely articles on topics you want to share. On Feedly, you can find content and organize it by categories.

Feedly is a terrific tool for categorizing content you may want to share with your audience.

It's pretty easy to get started with Feedly. Just follow these steps:

Go to Feedly and set up an account (it just connects to your Gmail).
Use the search box to find topics you're interested in. Feedly returns a list of websites or blogs that have the kind of content you're looking for.
Click on a site you want to follow. The right side of the page shows you the top stories from that site so you can see if you really want to follow it.
If the site is what you're looking for, click the Follow button. The Add a New Source sidebar slides out.
Give the website a category (you can create your own) and click Add.

I use Feedly to categorize content for my own social platforms, as well as my clients' platforms.

#2: Use IFTTT (If This Then That) to Collect Feedly Articles

IFTTT (If This Then That) is one of the most useful tools I've come across on the web. It shaves hours off of research time by automating simple tasks.

In order to automate tasks, you create what's called a recipe. For example, now that you're set up on Feedly, you can create a recipe that sends new articles to a Google spreadsheet—without you doing a thing!

To create a recipe, go to IFTTT and sign in or create an account.

Create a recipe to send your Feedly finds to a spreadsheet on Google Drive.

Here's how to create a recipe that sends Feedly articles to a Google Drive spreadsheet:

On your dashboard, click Create a Recipe.
On the next page, click "this" (you'll see what I mean when you're there).
Scroll through the Trigger Channels until you find Feedly, then click it and activate it.
On the Choose a Trigger page, click the New Article from the Category option.
Use the menu to choose which article category you want to send to the spreadsheet, then click Create Trigger.
Click "that" (again, you'll see what I mean when you're there).
Scroll through the options until you find Google Drive, then click it and activate it.
On the Choose an Action page, click the Add Row to Spreadsheet option.
On the Complete Action Fields page, name your spreadsheet and leave everything else the same.
Click Create Action, then click Create Recipe.

Instead of scanning news sources every day, you can simply download the spreadsheet about once a week and work your way through it, looking for helpful, relevant content to share.

The beauty of creating the spreadsheet on Google Drive is that you can access it anywhere. If you're out of the office and have a few moments to spare, you can go through the spreadsheet on your tablet.

The downloaded articles are ready for reviewing on Google spreadsheet.

#3: Choose and Curate Content

Use the spreadsheet to choose which articles are most relevant to your audience. Once you whittle down the articles to ones that are share-worthy, I suggest writing a status update you can schedule on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. (I usually write the status update in the Title cell to keep track of it.)

You'll notice I didn't mention Facebook in that list. That's because:

It's generally better to use Facebook's Scheduling tool so your posts are more prominent in the news feed.
When you use content management apps like HootSuite to share content on Facebook, sometimes the images don't show.

The extra effort to schedule via Facebook's tool is well worth it.

When sharing content, it's important to keep a few guidelines in mind. This checklist on the Content Marketing Institute's website provides 10 helpful steps to help you share content ethically.

Conclusion

Using Feedly and IFTTT together makes it so easy to track content, choose the best articles and share them with your clients and fans. The combined strength of these apps makes curation a piece of cake.

What do you think? Where do you find content to curate? What apps do you use to make sharing content easier? Please leave your thoughts and comments below.

Images from iStockPhoto.

Tags: cas mccullough, content curation, content curation tool, content marketing, content marketing plan, feedly, ifttt, share content, strategic content marketing

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The post How to Speed Up Your Content Curation Process appeared first on Make Money Online With Twitter Marketing.

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