To get the most out of a social feed, you need to be able to connect it to multiple different sources. That’s why many people choose their social feed tool based on how many social networks they can hook up to it.
It isn’t just about the various networks, though. The available methods for pulling posts also matter. Most social feeds simply let you use hashtags to aggregate posts from various networks. But sometimes, it makes more sense to aggregate posts another way. You may want to be even more specific with the content you display on your social wall or have more control over what is shown.
Walls.io collects content from multiple social platforms including Twitter. For each social network, you can add multiple sources. For Twitter, for example, you can add tweets with specific hashtags or tweets posted by specified profiles.
To help you curate Twitter feeds and add even more specific content to your social feed, we recently added Twitter Collections and Twitter Lists as additional Twitter sources in Walls.io.
Read on and learn how to create specific Twitter Collections and Lists, how to add them to your wall, and use them on your website or on a display at your event.
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Mix curated Twitter content with content from many other social media platforms, as well as custom content created by your brand.
How to Create a Twitter Collection
Twitter collections let you curate individual tweets into a timeline, which you can then link to, embed somewhere — or simply use as a source for your social media wall. A collection functions just like a regular timeline, except it only shows the tweets you selected.
Here are some ideas for tweets that you can add to a collection:
- Selected tweets from your personal profile
- Selected tweets about an event
- Selected tweets from influencer profiles on a topic relevant to your industry
- Tweets containing positive mentions of your product
In this example, we created a Twitter collection containing image and video tweets about social feeds powered by Walls.io.
You can easily create a Twitter Collection by using Twitter’s TweetDeck app:
(1) Go to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
(2) Click the + (add column) located on the left bar
(3) Click on “Collection”
(4) Click “Create Collection”
(5) Add a “Name” and a “Description”
(6) Find the Tweets you want to include in your collection.
(7) Click on the arrows on the bottom-right of the desired tweet, hold, and drag into the Collection column
(8) Unfurl the settings of the column and click on share to get the link to the collection
How to create a Twitter List
While Twitter Collections are a great way to curate individual tweets, Twitter Lists let you create a list of tweets based on Twitter profiles.
This is a great option if you don’t want to look for individual tweets, as sometimes that’s just not feasible. Instead, you can add the profiles of users whose tweets you want to populate the timeline.
Twitter lists are a great option if you want to:
- Collect and show all the tweets posted by speakers at your conference
- Collect the tweets of all your brand ambassadors
- Collect the tweets of influencers in your industry
- Collect the tweets of your employees
- Collect tweets from Twitter news profiles relevant to your business
Creating Twitter Lists is easy and can even be done on the Twitter web app:
(1) Go to your Twitter profile and click on “Lists”
(2) On the right-hand side, click the “Create new list” button
(3) Come up with a name and description for your list, set it to “public” (otherwise, you won’t be able to embed it on your social feed later), and save it
(4) Start adding the relevant profiles to your list
The benefits of Twitter Collections and Lists
You might wonder why you should bother creating Collections and Lists for your social feed instead of adding your Twitter sources another way. But Collections and Lists give you more control over the content you show on your social wall without necessarily having to spend time moderating your wall.
There’s a lot of great content already on Twitter. But it’s a lot of information. Whether it’s content created by you, your customers or influencers in your industry, you can use Lists and Collections to cut down on the noise and really dig down into a topic.
Adding Collections and Lists to your social feed offers a new way to curate your wall. Especially with Collections, you can be even more stringent by hand-picking the posts that are shown on your wall.
Twitter Collections are also editable on the fly. So if you build a collection and realize you need to add or remove a tweet, TweetDeck dynamically refreshes all the instances of the Collection no matter where you’re using it.
Adding your Twitter Lists and Collections to your social feed is as easy as adding any other kind of source. Simply navigate to your sources and click on “add source”. Select Twitter from the dropdown of sources. Then, just like adding a hashtag or a profile as a source, select Collection or List and paste the URL into the text field.
You can even add additional words, phrases, or hashtags to filter the content from your List or Collections. Just in case you want even more control over the content shown on your wall.
Why curated UGC is great for your business
User-generated content makes for great social proof. Collect the great things users are saying about your brand and then use that content to convince others to buy your products as well. Hashtag campaigns and social media walls are a great way to intentionally collect and display user-generated content.
You can also use a social feed to mix content you curated in a Twitter Collection or a List with similar content from other social media platforms and native posts featuring your products, for example. You can then embed the social wall on your website, use it as a resource in a sales call or display it at an event.