by Tony Vidler       

If you want new ideas for how to develope your business or inspiration for your own content marketing then you really should look at Twitter.  It is a platform that many advisers have simply ignored as far as I can see, but it is well worth taking a look at.

Whether those new ideas are about how to prospect or improve your marketing, or deep technical analysis on portfolio construction or the implications of the latest tax twist, I am willing to bet that Twitter will have a host of great articles and experts parading their material for you for free…and the format of just 280 characters per tweet means that you can scan a lot of potential ideas and content really quickly.

Apart from just being a great source of new thinking, ideas and inspiration it is almost unparalleled in my experience for building an audience rapidly.  

Whatever your area of interest there are thousands of people on Twitter delivering, sharing and commenting on your topic of choice at any given moment in time.  The challenge is filtering out the noise and zero’ing in on the best quality content or authorities for you. But one of the great things about it is once you’ve got a handle on it you can collect ideas easily via your phone in those spare minutes before meetings and the likes. It is a wonderful platform to dip into and out of – and save material – very quickly via your phone.

You can do simple searches on twitter by keyword, hashtag or topic and it throws up a lot of choices in a second.  Using “financial planning” for instance immediately throws up a stream of the “top” content around that topic.  You don’t even need a hashtag when searching that way, but using hashtags can be extremely useful when looking for hot topics or niche topic areas.  To be sure some of it is nonsense, but it only takes a couple of minutes to find some high calibre content producers in that stream of articles.  Simply click on any one of the people who catch your eye as having particularly good comments or articles and follow them to keep an eye on anything new that they post.  Easy as….

It gets better though. …once you’ve found a couple of folk who are hitting the mark for you the Twitter algortihm constantly suggests other similar top accounts that are worth following on the topic.

In short, if you know what sort of content you are looking for then it is a gold mine of great stuff put out into the ether by genuine thought leaders for free.  The downside of course is that like any other social media platform there are a host of idiots, pushy salespeople and trolls.  You can minimise those folk though.

Begin with a clear purpose about the type of information you are looking for.

Then look for lists

A lot of experts build lists of people worth keeping an eye on, and you can tap straight into those lists to narrow your search down to quality content and idea producers.  Using my own Twitter account as an example, there are a few lists there that I add to, and delete from, regularly.  Want sales and marketing ideas?  Or people continually posting good content in financial services. Or want to read stuff from other coaching types who do similar stuff to me?

There’s a list for each of those….

The point here is that once you find a few people who have the sort of new thinking and new ideas you are looking for there is a good chance they have built some lists of others working the same topic area, so you don’t even have to look that hard to find subject matter experts.  Simply click on the list and see the members, and follow them individually if you like, or even easier subscribe to the list.

Then of course you can see wo the expert you like is following to see where they get their inspiration, and follow them. 

The point is that there are countless great thinkers out there on virtually any topic you can think of, who willingly share great content that you can dip into and out of whenever you want or need to.

In a time of increasing busy-ness and market noise it has become more important than ever before to be able to sift out the rubbish and focus on quality news or quality content. Good ideas have never been more valuable for professionals really, and in that respect Twitter is more useful than most other platforms.

If you want new ideas then yoiu really should check it out.

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