Here is a step by step process on how you create simple auto feed of content to your Twitter account.

Step 1. Identify relevant information sources on Internet. You can use Google Search, Technorati search to locate blogs, news sites, papers, etc that have great content that’s highly relevant to your Twitter followers.

Example for Social CRM:

I identified major bloggers in Social Business space [Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0] and collected their blogs informations here.

Step 2. Find link to RSS feeds for each data source.

Example:

I clicked on a first blog address listed in my table referenced above. It happened to be Andy McAfee’s blog.

You can copy all the RSS addresses to a notepad for now.

Step 3. I like using Yahoo! pipes to aggregate and sort RSS feeds. Here is a very simple example of how you can use Yahoo! pipes to aggregate RSS feeds.

a) goto Yahoo! pipes. Click on Create a pipe button.

b) Start adding RSS links:

c) after you are done adding all the links, drag Sort function to a workspace and Pipe output. Connect all the pieces. Do not forget to name and save your pipe!

Step 4. now you need to save RSS link to this pipe and use it in a feed burner to start publishing your highly informative content to your Twitter stream. I am using Google’s Feedburner for this:

Words of caution:

- make sure you select relevant content [to your audience, of course!];

- test your Yahoo! pipe to ensure you are getting an output you expected to get;

- adjust Feedburner to publish limited number of articles in reasonable time frame.

Feel free to drop me a note if you need help with your content strategy or content automation!

I’ve been doing number of workshops on how to use Twitter for business. Each time I had to go into lengthy overview of different content types and twitter content strategies.

Here is a quick overview of my thoughts on this subject.

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy includes the following stages:

• Planning (business goals, target audience, type and sources of content, frequency of distribution, etc);
• Content creation (tools, processes, methods);
• Publication (tools, processes, methods);
• Analysis/Governance (usefulness, relevance, etc..)

Let’s look at major Twitter content types.

• “Meforming” [term introduced by Guy Kawasaki] – you telling us where you are, what you eat, who are you with, etc..
• News/articles sharing – you including a link to a news story you liked;
• Event announcements;
• How to questions/complains;
• You responding, commenting on someone else’s content.

Here is a random snapshot of my twitter stream:

Out of 8 tweets, 6 contain shared links, 1 event announcement, 1 how to question. Based on my observations, about 75%-80% of all tweets contain links or belong to news/article sharing category. This is very important to understand. It means that people mostly use Twitter to share an interesting content they found elsewhere or on Twitter.

And now we come to an interesting question that I am sure will generate good discussions: does it make sense to automate some of content discovery and delivery processes on Twitter channel?

The answer from Guy Kawasaki is very loud and clear – YES, it does make sense to do this. He is using a combination of Alltop [content aggregation and discovery tool] with ObjectiveMarketer [content delivery service] to populate his twitter updates. He is also a strong proponent of repeated content delivery – each of his tweets gets repeated 4 times at a different time intervals.

My personal Twitter content strategy is different for each Twitter account I manage: some of them I run in 100% automated manner, for some I use a combination of automated and manual content delivery services. How did I decide which strategy to use? Based on the business goals for each Twitter account. [see content strategy stages above].

How about you? Do you have Twitter content strategy? Does it work for you? Does it meet your business and personal goals?

I’d like to go back to basics if you will and refresh our understanding on one of the key pieces of “social” strategy for any business: online content strategy.

In media production and publishing, content is information and experiences that may provide value for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. [Wikipedia]

Here is how I classify online content:

-         Static [Web site; Press Release and alike];

-         dynamic:

• Real-time [twitter and alike];
• Periodic [blogs, RSS feeds and alike].

Online content distribution channels:

-         web site;

-         Twitter;

-         Facebook;

-         LinkedIn;

-         Google Buzz;

-         Google Wave;

-         Blog;

-         New channels, etc..

Points to address:

-         What online content distribution channels my business need to engage with?

-         Will the same content be used across all of them?

-         Sequence of content distribution;

-         Dependencies;

-         Frequency;

-         Ownership;

-         Workflows.

I am sure different businesses [and people] have deployed different content strategies.

Today, for example, Tim O’Reilly posted the following on Google Buzz:

Ok. I’ve stopped feeding my tweets into Buzz. Will use this site only for longer discussions. Adding comments to tweets didn’t really work because they take too long to show up here. Those of you who did read my tweets here, you should follow @timoreilly on twitter.

I may still post some of the same links to both places, when I want to make additional comments.

What is your content strategy? Does it work for you? How do you assess the quality of the content and the quality of online content distribution strategy?

Your war stories please!