Today’s blog post is from someone I met Windmill Networking on Twitter, Aaron Lee. Aaron represents how truly global Twitter (and social media) have become, as I have been able to build up a virtual relationship with him being in Malaysia through someone else I met on Twitter that was in Hong Kong! Aaron is very social on Twitter, so if you haven’t been following him, you’re missing out on great tweets and getting to know a great person. When he commented on my previous blog post as to where to find great content to tweet, I thought that we could all learn a lot from him sharing his perspective with us.
Well known as @askaaronlee on Twitter, Aaron describes himself as an “Average Joe” with a strong passion for social media. He loves the idea of using social media for branding and building a presence online. Aaron is a blogger at askaaronlee.com giving tips on social media and Twitter.
Finding content may be hard as Twitter is packed with so much information and tweets to read. So how do you decide what to tweet or find great content to share on Twitter? Neal wrote a blog post the other day covering 5 ways to find content to tweet to your followers and explaining that there are no excuses for not having great content to tweet. If you’ve not read it, you might want to take a look at the great post from Neal. Neal actually covered most of the ways that I personally use to find great content and tweet. I use 4 out of 5 that that Neal recommended in his post.
However, I do have three extra ways that I use to find tweets to post. They are:
1. Chirrps
Chirrps is pretty straight forward with their tagline “Hottest News Tweets On Twitter”. With Chirrps you are able to search the hottest tweet and they rank it according to how “hot” the tweets are or how many retweets a person gets from a tweet. Chirrps has two great futures that I like. The first is the ability to search based on any keywords. For example you can search the keyword “LinkedIn” on Chirrps and it will search and rank all the tweets – that people tweet with the keyword “LinkedIn” – according to the number of retweets categorized under recent, 24 hours and 48 hours. This is a good feature because you want to know what’s “hot” at the moment, something not many websites can do. The next feature that I like about Chirrps is that you can search the users as well. From there you can see their most recent tweets and their top retweets.
2. Favstar
Favstar is a tool that I like to use from time to time. One thing I love about Favstar is that you get to know who are the people that favorited your tweets. One feature which is currently missing from Favstar is the ability to search based on keywords. What you can do with this tool is search Twitter users and find what their most favorite tweet from people are. You also get laser targeted users that you can follow on Twitter. I doubt spammers will take the time to favorite a tweet. Knowing who favorited your tweets is a good feature because sometimes someone might favorite your tweet but might not retweet it. So whenever I see someone whom I didn’t talk for a while and didn’t retweet my tweets but favorite it, I’ll send them a tweet and thank them for favoring my tweet and start a short conversation with them.
3. TweetMeme
How can we forget the first retweet button that has been used by so many blogs before Twitter came up with their own version of a retweet button? I search TweetMeme whenever I do not have much to tweet about on Twitter. One thing I dislike about TweetMeme is I am not able to search the latest tweets like what Chirrps and Topsy are able to do. However, I can search tweets based on the number of retweets, from more than 100+ to more than 5000+ retweets. So basically you are able to search the most popular tweets. I always target more than 100+ tweets because I am sure if 100 people retweeted it then it’s worth reading and retweeting.
Besides these three there are some other web services that you can use to help you find great content. One of them is paper.li which is a “Twitter newspaper.” I don’t really use them but you’ll be able to find great content inside it. It’s worth playing around with it.
So these are the three methods that I use to find great contents to tweet. Are you using any of them? If you have more feel free to share. Neal and I would love to learn from you too.