In a recent post, I talked about ways to archive your favourite articles. If you do a lot of research online, perhaps browsing the news for blog topics, it’s good to have all your information in one spot. Google Reader is my weapon of choice. A large percentage of the news and stories I read come through RSS feeds and into Google Reader. Until recently, the one exception was Twitter. Although there are plenty of conversations happening on Twitter, there are also a lot of good links to stories I want to read later.
The slow way to tackle this is to click on each link, one by one, and save those articles individually. I like to try to keep my workflow segregated. Research time is separate from social media time. Otherwise, I’ll log onto Twitter for “just a minute”, and discover that the morning suddenly became 2 pm. I recently read a good article that shed some light on the usefulness of Twitter Favourites. If you spend most of your Twitter time in a 3rd party app like Hootsuite or Tweetie, you may not realize that your favourites have their own RSS feed. Give the article below a read, and find out how to increase your Twitter productivity.
Now, when you come across a potentially good story on Twitter, just add it to your favourites. Once you’ve got that feed added to Google Reader, it’s much easier to go through your favourites when you’re doing the rest of your research.