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This article was published on March 9, 2011

How to utilize the “Favorite” button on Twitter


How to utilize the “Favorite” button on Twitter

New to Twitter? This post will drastically improve the information you get from Twitter. For example, one of the most underused features on Twitter is the Favorite button that acts as a great way of bookmarking what you want to come back to later. It’s underused but the people who do use it are perhaps the best curators of content on the web because you can essentially piggyback on their hard work and get all their amazing content for free. It’s how I find lots of interesting things and one of my first ports of calls when I need to read amazing content without trawling the web. You should probably start putting Twitter on steroids yourself…

Step 1 – Find The People Who Favorite Great Content

First step is for you to have a look through all the people you would most like to follow. The chances are that most of them are not going to be favouriting things and it may take you a while to find somebody that does but once you do you will have hit the gold mine. This part is fairly manual and it will take some time but the effort is worth it because once you do find somebody who uses this feature you will purely be getting the best of their content. You’ll find a Favorites button on their own Twitter profile…

Step 2 – Open Your RSS Reader

You may have heard of RSS but are not sure what it is. Basically it is a tool that brings all the best content to you rather than you browsing around the web to find the best content. I suggest you use Google Reader and if you are not 100% sure what Google Reader is watch this short video…

If you already have a Gmail account or Google account of any sort you don’t even have to sign up for an account and can instead just log straight in to Google Reader.

Step 3 – Add The Favorite’s Feeds To Rss

Once you click on the “favorites” tab of the person you have found that you want to follow you should copy and paste the URL (remove # from it).


Once you have the copied URL you should then open (or have open in a different tab) your Google reader and paste the link in to the following box…


This process might seem a little intimidating to some but it’s actually really simple once you start to use it and is literally a cut and paste job. There is a fair amount of manual work in finding the best people and their favorites but you can just add them as you go along day to day.

Step 4 – Sit Back And Enjoy The Cream Of The Crop

Once you have added a few of the feeds you will see your Google Reader filling up. It’s in real time as well so as soon as any of these great people favorite something it’ll show up in your Google Reader. You can see how if you take a little time and put some effort in you can leverage the massive power of Twitter, let the really smart people do the curating and just sit back and lap up all the amazing content!

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