We all know by now how important quality content is to building an engaged, but the struggle is how to cut through content clutter to find the posts and articles you really want to read and share. It isn’t just the ads that pop up in the middle of articles or social news feeds that bother us these days (there is adblock tools for that!) The real pain we feel is behind wasting time scrolling through rubbish post after rubbish post to find something we like enough to share ourselves with others!
Being in the business of creating social media strategies, planning and finding awesome content to network with is right up there as a daily task for my team. To reduce the content clutter and time spent on these tasks we use tools and features and here is 3 of the easiest free ways you can save yourself a lot of time and cut through the clutter yourself:
Twitter Lists
By creating a private Twitter list you basically are filtering out all the tweets and making a custom news feed of only the tweets you want to see. Making it private means it is only visible to you – which is a great way to monitor and track and add the great account sources you tend to rely on to create a custom news feed. We create a number of private lists based on interest topics, influencers and personal business networks that we see as a reliable source of info to either curate our own tweets or network with by retweeting.
To create a List scroll down the left side of your profile under photos
Then give your List a name and decide if you want to allow other people to see and subscribe to or keep it to yourself and private.
To add a Twitter profile to your list just click ont he cog wheel next to the follow/following button on their profile.
To view or edit your created lists at any time click on your settings cog wheel on your profile.
Facebook Interest Lists:
On your home page Facebook provides trending topics which helps you find popular content.
But in the menu on the left right near the bottom is a feature called “Interests”. To create a list click on the “More”. To move the list to the top of your left menu Home page news for quick reference, select ‘Add to Favorites’.
Much like Twitter, I create custom interest lists and add my own relevant people or page accounts in order to create my own custom news feed of quality posts. The other beauty of these lists is that they are free of any promotional posts.
Once you create the Interest list click on it’s title, then add any Facebook pages or profiles by starting to type the name in the bar on the left. As you add pages Facebook will start to suggest more relevant pages to help you build the custom news feed of posts.
In the example above you can see I have created a custom interest list to keep track of Australian news and business pages because these posts tend to get lost in the see of larger international media content Facebook considers relevant to me. It might be ‘topic relevant’, but given the purpose of using social media networks is to form and build relationships and I live in Australia, it’s more relevant to my followers to share local media from local writers I may want to associate or network with.
These lists can either be privately shared with your team member’s profiles if there is more than yourself needing to search for content or kept public for anyone to follow and you network with. I’ve created my own list of local business pages that I allow anyone to find and network with. Such a quicker way to connect and engage with my colleagues content.
Feedly
Is one of the best ways to monitor and keep track of great blog articles without cluttering your email inbox. I love this tool because again you can sort all the blog feeds you want to monitor into folders based on topics or networks relevant to you. Feedly will give you suggestions on popular websites to subscribe and add to your folders but you can copy and paste your own findings.
One of the key features to Feedly is it’s browser extension to quickly stay alerted to new content to read in a popup rather than loading the site to read the article – which means you avoid the ads and can be one of the first to share out news articles socially.
Other than saving you research time by removing the content clutter from your news feed, these three features are a great way to monitor and track what your competitors are saying and sharing with their audiences without them knowing. You don’t have to follow the social accounts to add them to a Twitter or facebook list, nor do you have to sign up to their email newsletter to receive a notification of their latest blog article.
