Great content deserves to be read and shared. The problem is, it can be difficult to find and cumbersome to pass along.
Often our processes slow us down and keep us from sharing what the world needs to see and read.
Here’s how to find and curate some of the most interesting links on the web, no matter what your interests are.
1. Twitter
This is where it all begins for me. Twitter is, bar-none, the best tool for discovering great content. Facebook is good for discovering who is having a bad day or who just got engaged, but as far as brain-stimulation, going to Facebook rather than Twitter to learn something is like going a circus instead of reading a book.
Here’s how I curated my list of great people to follow on Twitter. I follow very sparingly, and I even have a more select, private list of people who share the best content, all the time.
If you don’t know any thought leaders in the area you’re interested in, check out Twitter’s suggested list of people to follow and work from there.
You can also link your email account to Twitter to find people who interact with on the web. Don’t assume that everyone you know is a good sharer on Twitter, but hopefully some sharp people you know are using the tool well.
2. Feedly
Once I find smart people, I pray they have a blog and subscribe to it via RSS. I use Feedly to read the posts when I have time throughout the day or on the weekends. I use the web application through Safari and their gorgeous iOS app.
I can quickly skim through the headlines and decide which blogs I want to read. What I also love about Feedly is that it shows how many times each blog post has been shared next to the post title, so I have a good gauge for the most popular recent posts on each blog I follow.
I have my blogs broken up into a few categories. The categories I chuck blogs into are:
- Business
- Design
- Faith
- Finance
- Fun
- Ministry
I like having different categories for blogs, so I can quickly find information I’m particularly interested in that day.
3. Instapaper
I don’t have time to read every article as soon as I come across it on Twitter or in Feedly. Instapaper always me to click the link and save it for later to my personalized newspaper. It saves an unlimited amount of articles, strips them of ads and the busyness of normal web pages and puts them into a clean interface for me to read later.
I sync my Instapaper account Tweetbot (the absolute best Twitter client for iOS) and Feedly. With a single click in either of those apps, the articles I’m interested in reading are saved. The next time I open up Instapaper, I have all of my saved articles download and ready for reading.
4. Buffer App
Once you read a great article in Instapaper, after curating it from Twitter or Feedly, I want to share it. The problem is, most of the time, I read a handful or dozen articles in one sitting, and sharing them all at the same time just creates noise.
So, I use Buffer to create some space (or buffer) between each tweet I shoot out with the article I’m sharing. Buffer allows you to schedule up to 5 tweets at a time and pre-select times when you want them to be released to your followers.
Buffer includes analytics on how many times the links were clicked as well. With the analytics feature, you can find the optimal time to share content and see the types of articles your Twitter followers (or Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections) are interested in reading.
Buffer syncs with Instapaper and Feedly, so you can share great articles straight from the apps you’re reading in.
There you have it. Curate a list of great tweeters and bloggers, save their best content, read it when you get the time and share it with the world. A simple, streamlined process that makes finding and sharing great content easier than ever.