I’ve been experimenting with my Twitter use lately. People use social media in such a great variety of ways and can have quite differing philosophies on how to most effectively connect and engage with others. Many people subscribe to the following when it comes to ⭐ing Tweets:
Twitter tip of the year: "Favorite" tweets liberally, not sparingly. It lets people know you see them & care about what they're thinking. ??
— Matt Brown (@evangelistmatt) July 21, 2015
As I mentioned earlier this year, I have adopted a slightly different approach to engagement on Twitter. I maintain a more curated list of ⭐ed content. Over the past couple weeks I have set up a few IFTTT recipes that better handle my ⭐ing on Twitter. The first recipe takes Tweets I have ⭐ed and published them to this blog. I use the old retired Pressgram plugin for handling these incoming posts – converting them to a custom post type. The second recipe catches any users whose Tweets I’ve ⭐ed and adds them to my Twitter list of Favorited users which then serves as a feed of Tweets I know are coming from folks who often publish great content. Go ahead, visit the list and see what I mean. Or, visit vandercar.net/gem to see my full list of ⭐ed Tweets. (You can see I’m making use of WordPress’s new emoji support for URLs. Probably not the best implementation, as support elsewhere is spotty, but I wanted to test the limits of emoji support when registering custom post types.)
This approach to ⭐ing on Twitter offers a few benefits.
- Like highlighting in a book, I have easy access to the highest quality content I’ve encountered on Twitter.
- I am able to share these good finds with family and friends who are not active on Twitter.
- I create a list that should prove to stream more excellent things.
- These ⭐ed users hopefully gain a wider sphere of influence.
For what it’s worth, this is my current approach regarding the little gold star.