Echofon can act as your personalized live newspaper. Using this application as complimentary to your active personal account can help you react quicker to news stories and make you more influential to your followers. Below we can see a screenshot of the beauty in action. When minimized the speech bubble will have a number inside indicating how many unread tweets you have.
You can also set the application to update at different time intervals, as well as the great popup function. The popup interval allows you to specify how often you would like incoming tweets to pop up in bottom right corner of your browser. This feature can help you get information on the fly while working 🙂
Step 1: Find Newsbreakers (Made up word - Those who break news :-D)
If it is imperative that you stay up to date with revelations in say the sporting world, it would make sense to open a dedicated twitter account and follow ONLY influencers of the niche. I would advise to start with a large list of influencers and reduce the list on a weekly basis. An account that tweets useless information 10-15 times a day, is likely less valuable to you than an account that tweets once a month with ground breaking information.
Step 2: Take Out The Trash
To clean up this feed you should aim to keep this list below 50. A great tool to help you find the true story breakers is Twiangulate. Being the sports junkie I am, I have noticed over time that @jasonlacanfora and @richeisen regularly are the 1st to break stories in the world of NFL. Granted they work for NFL network but there must be some value to be derived from who they follow. Here we can see an example below of the use of Twiangulate.
Both follow @Horrigan46 who is a researcher at NFL network. Now he may not be responsible for ground breaking news but from his profile we can see where both get some of their awesome NFL trivia.
