Create Email Newsletter Content Using Social Media, Twitter and Web 2.0 – 5 Top Tips

Creating email newsletter content is an ongoing challenge for any publisher. A recent industry survey showed that the number one reason companies abandoned their email newsletter was the lack of resources to write fresh content.

Use social media and Web 2.0 channels to ease the chore of creating email newsletter content. As an added bonus, if you get your readers involved in creating the content, you build a very engaged following.

Here are 5 ways to use social media and Web 2.0 to build a stream of fresh, relevant email newsletter content.

1. Post a poll to your LinkedIn groups about a hot topic and summarize the results. You can use LinkedIn for surveying in two ways. First, you can post a question to any of your professional LinkedIn groups free. Secondly, you can pay to have a poll sent to a targeted group on LinkedIn. For instructions on how to do a LinkedIn poll, sign into your LinkedIn account, select the “help” option at the top and enter “creating a poll”.
   
   
2. Use Twitter content in your email newsletters. For example, create a monthly twitter Q & A column in your monthly email newsletter. In that column, publish the most interesting questions you received on Twitter and your answer. This is a great way to increase your Twitter following. To encourage more subscribers to your Twitter account, make sure you list Twitter address in the signature line of your email accounts, on your blog and your Web site.
   
   
3. Interview an industry leader, top customer, customer or your in-house experts via Twitter and publish the results as an article. Make sure you plan this correctly and format it appropriately or face the consequences. Here is an example of a well-done Twitter article, an interview of marketingprof’s Ann Handley. Here is an interview by George Stephanopoulos of John McCain that did where the Twitter article did not go so well
   
   
4. Look at your blog posts, capture the most interesting posts as articles in your email newsletter. Blogs are great tools for making daily or weekly posts to update your target audience on current trends, news, tips etc. For your audience to keep up on your blog posts, they must visit your blog regularly or subscribe to your rss feed.
   
   Email newsletters arrive into the recipients email and do not require them to take any additional action. By combining the two, you get the best of both. You also can decrease the amount of time it takes to produce an email newsletter from a blank screen.
   
   Luckily, recent technology updates make combining email newsletters and blog posts even easier. You can find several Wordpress plug-ins that will create an email newsletter from your Wordpress blog. In addition, you can add an email newsletter sign-up form on your blog.
   
   
5. Use igoolge.com as a platform to gather content ideas. You can set-up an igoogle.com account. From the first page of your account, you can track recent trends in Google searchers (with Google Insights for search, stream Google alerts monitor technorait (a blog search tool) and more.

Look to the social media and Web 2.0 channels to make it easier to create fresh, relevant content for your email newsletters.

To see how to use social media to capture new subscribers for your email newsletter, visit this hub.