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I'd like to build an RSS feed for my website's twitter. It would be a feed of links that interest my user demographic-- college students.. the links would be funny, informative, interesting, etc. Just something that'd make my demographic want to follow. I'd want to avoid anything NSFW, so I probably want to avoid far-out humor sites like collegehumor unless they're linked from a work-safe blog.

I already understand the technical side of building a feed, I was just wondering how I can compile a list of sources for the feed.. if it was based on some kind of solid marketing research (e.g. college students are known to follow so-and-so top 10 sites more than any others) that'd be great.

I'd really like to avoid paying for any marketing-research services as we're on a tight budget.. SO free would be the way to go!

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4 Answers

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One of the ways would be to find out the influential twitter users that tweet information abut college students. You can check,

http://wefollow.com/twitter/student

Then write a twitter bot to aggregate and filter the tweets from the users you find appropriate for your demographic.

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So would I retweet, or just grab the links? Also, on what basis would I filter their tweets? – babonk Dec 30 '10 at 6:09
I would suggest build an app that would aggregate and filter the tweets. There can be different filters such as remove NSFW content, categories the information, quality checks for the data etc. As an example, look at what cheaptweet.com has done for the deals. It would be interesting if you can do something similar(by similar I don't mean deals related, but the concept of aggregation and filtering) for the college students as that would be more useful to that demographic. – Rahul Dec 30 '10 at 21:34
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to be honest it sounds like a waste of time. Twitter is fad, overrated, and a piss poor solution to marketing. 99% of business that are on twitter have no idea why they are. It doesnt produce results. The majority of what goes on twitter is done by robots. Very few people actually read tweets, and if they do they are missing a few brain cells.

Dont get me wrong, twitter has a small purpose to effectively publish links to your new articles, or share promotions. But the reality is that most of the content you publish or post to twitter seldom gets realized.

Unless if you are a celebrity with a million followers, then twitter is greatly overrated. I dont want to sound pessimistic, but try doing some research into twitter conversions.

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Well, I was also going to use the service to keep in touch with my users, send messages to users who are tweeting (usually complaining) about textbook price (the product I offer), and follow users at my campus (its a local site).. I feel that providing useful content is a base upon which I can do those two without just seeming like I have a useless shell of a profile. – babonk Dec 30 '10 at 2:10
You cant go wrong doing it. Twitter is free, so you should be using it. What i found works best is to monitor other tweets like you mentioned, but best if you just link your twitter to facebook and blog posts. That way when you post a new blog entry it goes on your facebook page and your twitter feed. Just a way to syndicate things out. I just wouldnt count on twitter being your sole marketing because it is over saturated. – Frank Dec 30 '10 at 3:27
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I would try Twitter and Facebook. You can create a Facebook Ad and target students... Facebook Ads are very cheap - for now.

@Frank It is OK to have an opinion but not trash a great marketing tool like Twitter just because you either don't like it or don't understand it. Twitter, just like any other tool works very well as long as you know how to use it.

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You are right, im probably using it correctly. As for fb ads being cheap? Really? Cheap in regards to CPM? To me it doesnt matter if they are cheaper than google ads, they too do not work. – Frank Dec 30 '10 at 18:00
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How about creating a Twitter list from people that you found with WeFollow and then generating an RSS feed from that list?

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