The Best Way To Curate Content For Twitter

Ed Pronley

May 30, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

A lot of businesses use content curation in their marketing strategy. It’s especially popular with social media platforms, like Twitter. But it’s not as easy as sharing any piece of content you find. Content curation can take a lot of research and planning to make sure it’s effective. In this article, we talk about different types of content curation and how you can perform it effectively on Twitter.

What Is Content Curation?

Image via Unsplash by @ademay

Content curation is when you promote content to your audience you think they’ll find valuable. Essentially, it allows businesses to share information with their audience members to say “Hey! We think you might find this helpful. Or at the very least, interesting.”

Businesses curate content in different ways. One of the most popular ways is to collect pieces of content from external sources and share them over social media. However, businesses can also curate the content on their own website. The most common way companies do this is by optimizing and updating their most popular content and directing people to them through “Suggested Reading” links. This can lead people to other areas of the company’s site that might interest them. It can also improve the site’s bounce and conversion rate.

But as they say, you need to walk before you can run. So, let’s take a look at how you can use social media content curation to your advantage.

How To Curate Content for Your Business’s Twitter Account

Here is a list of steps to help you curate content for your Twitter account:

1. Know How Much Content You Want to Curate

Most businesses have trouble deciding exactly how much of their Twitter content should be original and how much they should curate. After all, content curation can lead people to your social media page and set you up as a thought leader in your industry. But remember that Twitter news feeds move quickly. There are over 500 million tweets sent per day, so a person’s feed can show loads of content that they can just scroll through until something catches their eye. How can you make sure where they stop the scroll is on what you have to share?

With the half-life of a tweet being around 20 minutes, meaning 50% of all the exposure you’ll receive for your tweet is in that timeframe, it’s typically a good idea to share more on the Twitter platform than you would on most other social networks. This is to increase the chances of more exposure as timelines refresh and new tweets come to the top.

2. Showcase your expertise

Even if you sent tweets out constantly, which is not really good practice, it doesn’t do much for you if your audience doesn’t think your company has its own expertise to offer. Therefore, make sure you’re sending a healthy ratio of tweets that contain your own content, whether text tweets or links to articles on your website, and content from around the web, either links to content from sites with helpful information or retweets from others. The most common ratio is 25%. That means one-quarter of all posts you make on social media should be curated content from elsewhere.

But 25% isn’t a rule, especially when all audiences are looking for different things. That’s why it’s helpful to simply remember quality over quantity. If you want to get really analytical about how much content you share and make sure you’re as close to 25% as possible, go for it. But as long as you’re sharing content that’s helpful and informative to your readers, they’re not going to mind if you’re sharing 26% or even 27%. Heck, go as high as 30% if you really want to, just make sure the content you share has value.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to compose a brand new tweet each time to get noticed. One way to increase the chances that your target audience sees your content is to reply to popular tweets in your industry. Look up trending hashtags related to your company’s industry and join the conversation. Just like when you’re having a conversation in person, naturally enter and contribute to the online discussion. Link to your content when appropriate without letting it feel forced or too self-promotional. Establish your company as an expertise in the chat first and content you share is more likely to gain interest from others.

3. Understand Your Audience’s Interest

This goes a bit hand-in-hand with understanding how much to share, but you want to make sure that your audience actually has an interest in the content you share. And that you understand their purpose for coming to Twitter. Do they use the platform for personal use? In that case, you might need to be more strategic to capture their attention. Do they come to Twitter and use hashtags to narrow in their search for specific content? What’s currently trending and how is your target audience reacting to it?

What you don’t want to do is just hop on a popular trend and post about it because you think it’ll generate traffic. If you do marketing for a graphic design agency, you won’t want to jump into a Twitter discussion about the best dressed at the Oscars unless you can genuinely relate it back to your brand. Instead, look at the problems your audience is facing. How are they struggling and how can your business or industry help them? Find content that touches on these topics or offers solutions. This is the type of content your audience wants to see.

If you aren’t quite sure what your audience wants to see, it’s time to learn. This knowledge can be the backbone of everything you share on your website, social media channels, newsletters, and more. And CopyPress can help. We offer a content marketing analysis tool that compares your content with your top three competitors. We can help you see how your content currently ranks and find holes in your content marketing strategy that you’d benefit from filling. Request your content analysis today to start understanding what resonates with your audience.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

4. Compile a List of Content

Once you know what you want to share, start compiling a list of content. The best way to do this is to scavenge industry websites, blogs, and newsletters. Then, create a spreadsheet of links you might want to tweet to your readers. You can even use the spreadsheet to organize the content by category. When you organize by category, you can create a series of tweets around a theme, like a particular hashtag. Research to see if there are any regular Twitter chats about a certain topic that’s relevant to your business. If there are, put the dates and times of those on your calendar so you can be sure your team is prepared to join the discussion.

For example, let’s say your company sells kitchenware and your audience is having trouble taking care of their stainless-steel pots and pans. You could find a number of articles on the proper care for stainless-steel kitchen equipment and share them over the course of a week. Throughout that week, you could not only include links to your own content, but end the series with a post to your own company’s e-commerce store where people can buy these products you’ve been talking about. In your content, use hashtags like #stainlesssteel, #stainlesssteelcare, and #kitchencare.

5. Make It Unique and Share-Worthy

Once you have a list of the content you want to share, it’s time to make it attractive and engaging. For Twitter, you want to create a post that not only generates likes and comments but retweets too. Start by writing out your posts ahead of time on the spreadsheet and make sure they’re compelling before posting them. Try invoking emotion in your readers and create a sense of urgency for them to click.

You’ll want to make sure you’re presenting it in a way that connects with why your audience is on Twitter in the first place and make it unique for each of your social platforms. If you create and curate the same content on each network, then what’s the benefit of following you in all the places where you’re active?

What sets Twitter apart is your ability, whether as a representative of your company or using your own account as a thought leader in your industry, to have quick yet engaging conversations with others in the field, including members of your target audience. Capitalize on this by curating content based on conversations you’re actively having online. And use hashtags that make sense.

Pro tip: Do a search for the hashtag you want to use before you use it to make sure it’s not a popular hashtag for a topic you don’t want to be associated with.

For example, if you’re promoting an article on taking care of stainless-steel cookware, your tweet might read “Having trouble with stains on your stainless steel? You’re not alone.” This tweet immediately connects to your audience’s struggle and encourages them to read the solution you’re offering. But also make sure to leave enough characters for the link. You can shorten the content’s link using tools like Bitly. This can help you add longer links to your tweets while leaving space for more words.