I enjoy all the wonderful information shared on Twitter, but this fire hose of information is sometimes overwhelming. I’m a working mom and non-traditional student, so my social media time is very limited and, therefore, very valuable.  Finding “Twitter Gold” as fast as possible and with as little effort as possible is critical to me. I’ve done my best to automate and simplify the process–and I’m sure there are much better ways of doing this–but here’s how I find, store, and share my “Twitter Gold.”

Step 1. Twitter Lists  (Categorize) —  Hello, my name is Yvonne, and I am a Twitterholic. I love it. I can’t live without it.  I use Twitter to connect with people and organizations that share common interests with me (i.e., #techcomm, #scicomm, #marcomm, #highered, #elearning #edtech #womenintech, #dataviz, #openaccess #openeducation, #openscience, etc). Therefore, if I follow you on Twitter, it’s likely that I’ve added you to one of my  curated Twitter lists. (The majority of my Twitter lists are public, so feel free to peruse or subscribe to them.)

Step 2. Paper.li  (Aggregate) — Because of the amazing number of individuals and organizations that share my interests, I follow a healthy number of Twitter accounts, which means, it’s impossible to read all the tweets from these accounts. My curated Twitter lists help me address this issue (and so do #hashtags), but it’s still very likely that I’m missing some really amazing tweets. Therefore, I use Paper.li (which is a news aggregator) to filter out little nuggets of gold from my curated Twitter lists and my favorite #hashtags.  (I currently produce two papers using Paper.li: One is a news aggregation of communication stories, and one is a news aggregation of education stories.) 

Step 3. Storify (Curate) — Paper.li is a huge time saver, but then what do I do with all these lovely nuggets of gold I’ve found. Of course, I retweet them, but then what? That’s where Storify comes in. Storify allows me to create a curated list of tweets (and also add notes or annotations). I can then access these nuggets of gold, which are now categorized as “stories” at any time.  (My curated stories are also public.)

Step 4. Share — It’s too easy for me to find an excuse to avoid this last step.  I tell myself I just don’t have the time, but in reality it’s pretty simple. I have a blog and a LinkedIn profile (with access to the new publishing platform), so there is no excuse for not sharing my gold.