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10 Comments

Newsletters with lots of embedded tweets

Hi all

Do you run, or know of, newsletters that contain mostly tweets. Or put another way, newsletters that curate tweets (with perhaps the author's own notes inserted alongside).

I want to learn how to manage the workflow of such a newsletter format (e.g. from bookmarking tweets, to picking what goes into the next issue).

Would love to hear from authors, or links to such newsletters.

Thanks!

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    Techmeme's email newsletter contains a "Top News" section, which highlights the very biggest stories of the day, along with short selection of social media commentary about the story from Twitter (example, or screenshot).

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    I often include tweets in my newsletter, The Friday Dispatch.

    Here are two recent examples:

    http://fridaydispatch.com/issues/what-got-them-here-won-t-get-you-there-fd136-277546

    http://fridaydispatch.com/issues/a-positive-start-to-your-weekend-fd138-281039

    But, I'll admit that my newsletter is not mostly comprised of curated tweets. I just sprinkle them in on occasion.

    My newsletter is hosted using Revue. Revue gives a nice Chrome extension that allows you to curate articles, social posts, and media for upcoming issues of your newsletter.

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      Btw I love your analysis of Traf's iOS icon pack success. Unfortunately it happens all the time - people see someone made money with X and they too want to do X, missing the whole prior effort and journey to get there.

      And you made me pause and think about "building in public". It probably works if "public" is the audience you're serving, and other makers, but the rest of the population may not care. I'm experimenting with it myself but TBH I didn't quite get it really.

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        I love this comment! I feel people are often all too quick to follow a 'roadmap' without doing the hard work to understand their ecosystem.

        I run a company that provides editing to writers. In 2008, when we started, we leveraged Twitter to build a customer base. What we did then wouldn't work today. Twitter is now a very different beast.

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          Wow what would say is the biggest difference between 2008 twitter and 2020 twitter?

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            Twitter used to be a genuine community. The kinds of people using it were looking to connect, learn, and understand. Very much like IndieHackers.

            We were lucky, in that we were using the platform as it started to grow. This meant we were often heard above the noise. Since we provide services to writers, it was a natural match for our target market.

            Once it hit a critical mass, two things happened.

            The first was that 'marketers' started to spam the platform. This forced people to become much warier. The second was that the nutters arrived. Conversation dropped off and people started looking elsewhere.

            If I was building the company from scratch today, I'd ignore Twitter and, instead, focus on trying to find a smaller communites of writers and try to gain some ind of foothold.

            One thing we still do on Twitter, is to use hashtags. We post 10-20 times a day and every post uses the hashtag #writingcommunity. This helps us to be seen and is driving some sales.

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              Ha so they arrived and never left:)

              Must have been really exciting to be on here as it was picking up traction. I remember getting on Twitter around the time "tweetups" were hot. I guess that's testament to your point about real communities on twitter.

              Yeah these days it sounds like communities are living in their own spaces rather than as part of one big open "bazaar".

              Interesting that you're using hashtags to good effect. I thought people have stopped using them.

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                The way I think about things is that social media has caused fragmentation.

                Everyone is after the feeling that they belong somewhere. Big platforms, such as Twitter, promise this but never really deliver. I think hashtags on Twitter are kind of providing this feeling to an extent.

                I guess that we will see a continued fragmentation to smaller and smaller niche communities.

                Don't get me wrong; most of our marketing energy goes into blog posts, SEO, and content creation. Twitter and Facebook are simply tools we now use because Google tracks engagement, which helps with ranking.

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                  Great insight. Learned a lot from this. Thank you for sharing!

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      This is great, thanks @KenW. Didn't realise Revue had a curation tool. Sounds really useful. I'll have a look.

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