Building your Twitter following takes work.

Many early adopters developed large followings by scouring the Web to find and share evergreen, niche-specific content. That’s content curation.

Twitter users caught on quickly, breeding competition to deliver such content first. As reliable sources became widely known, it became harder to tip others off to “new” content.

Content curation now needs a more dynamic approach. Real-time content discovery and disbursement are essential.

What’s annoying is that a lot of content discovery has had to be done manually—until now. Introducing five ways to discover and curate content in real time:

1. Bottlenose.com

This site combines your Twitter and LinkedIn activity preferences with a continuous scan of trending topics to deliver tailored results in real time. The searching ability of Bottlenose is solid, too.

2. rt.ly (a.k.a. real time from bit.ly)

This tool serves up content along with that story’s real-time popularity. For example, at a given moment an interview with Jay-Z might be shared at a rate of 16.2 times per minute.

3. Sulia.com

The tag line for this service is the “interest network,” which is a fair summation. It’s also owner of the most attractive user experience, borrowing a bit of functionality from Pinterest.

4. Alternion.com

This service, too, combines your social media preferences with real-time discovery and organization.

5. Social Buzz (from social-searcher.com)

Social Buzz takes your keywords, runs a search, and adds the analytics associated with those results to give you the most relevant content options.

Why tools like these give you a competitive advantage

As stated earlier, real-time discovery of quality content is increasingly important; pre-scheduling old content doesn't have the impact that readers want.

The chart below explains it.



The “real-time content discovery hot spot” is when you need to act—and fast—in order to be seen as a news breaker and not a news follower.