Twitter BannerYou may already understand the importance of regularly publishing quality content on your website. After all, quality content is going to be the thing that helps new visitors find your site via search engines, and keeps them coming back to learn more about your area of focus.

Sometimes there are great articles and other pieces of content that have already been published on the Internet (whether on third-party websites or previously on your own site). It’s possible to leverage this content through a process known as “content curation.” Unfortunately, content curation is something that many website owners don’t fully understand.

Content curation is republishing short excerpts of existing articles or other relevant web content on your website, along with some original commentary or supplemental information relating to the article. This helps your website visitors learn more about the subject matter of the topic you’re writing on, and allows you to deliver your own on-point message.

Twitter is a great tool for curating web content. A short message from you, along with a link to the content, can be an excellent way to keep your followers up to date with information that they’re likely to find helpful and valuable. While you can manually curate various content sources with Twitter, there are some Twitter Tools that can make the process much easier and efficient.

Dlvr.it

Dlvr.it (http://www.dlvr.it) lets you pull content from standard RSS feeds and have it automatically delivered to your various social media accounts and feeds, including Twitter. (Other supported outlets include Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+). Dlvr.it also has the ability to link your Dlvr.it account with Google Analytics, so that you can measure how effective your content curation efforts are at bringing content to your website.

HootSuite

If you’ve already spent some time using Twitter to promote your website then there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with HootSuite (http://www.hootsuite.com). HootSuite is a comprehensive tool for managing all of your various social media accounts and outlets, and can be used to solve a number of different business problems. One of the features of HootSuite is the ability to quickly and easily curate content from a number of leading sources, including StumbleUpon, YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo, TrendSpottr, and Scoop.it.

Swayy.co

One of the biggest issues when it comes to curating content via Twitter is finding new content to provide to your followers. The new service Swayy.com (http://www.swayy.co) helps you to identify content that’s relevant to your niche, and then quickly and easily post curated links to that content on Twitter (as well as on your other social media accounts).

Honorable mentions:

EverPost.com

http://everpost.co filter by keywords, industries  and suddenly you have an array of content to feed into different social channels.  They offer real time posting or you can use their scheduling feature which will share at optimal times into Twitter, Facebook Fan Page or Linkedin Profile or Company Page.

ContentGems

This is another gem of a tool.  You choose the topics and set it to update you daily with a curated list of matching content within your email box.  If you are stuck on topic ideas for writing your next series of blogs, Contentgems solves that problem and enables you to share your insight and curated content to social media sites Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+ or you can post your insights in the form of a blog post directly in your WordPress site.

Regardless of the Twitter tools you choose to help you curate new content on your website, be sure to pay attention to what your visitors respond best to. By providing them with quality links and content, you’ll be sure to keep them following your Twitter feed and coming back to your website.

Now it’s your turn, what tools do you use to curate and publish content?