Don’t miss out on these important sources of small town news

If you don’t like using Twitter, but you still want to see the rural stories I share on Twitter, look at the @SBSurvival Twylah page.

Every week, I look for small town and rural business stories to share with you. I look for stories about shop local and the local movement, planning and development as relates to rural, rural news, community involvement, and ideas you can try in your town. Some of them end up as stories I share here, but most don’t.

Now I do realize that not all of you are the same. You like to get your info in certain ways and on specific networks. Other people like different forms or other networks. That’s why I use some selected automation to share these stories from one site to another.

Where the stories come from

I find stories to share from:

• Google Alerts and TalkWalker alerts
• Subscriptions to selected sites via RSS or email
• My list of Small Town/Rural Resources on Twitter

Because I can’t watch my list of Small Town/Rural Resources all day, I let Paper.li create a daily summary of all the links those smart people share. I read it to catch up with what was shared throughout the day.

Where the stories go, so you can find them

Reading my Small Town/Rural Paper.li is the first way you can catch lots of rural stories without spending all day watching for them. These are stories shared by any of the people on my list, but not curated. So you may see non-relevant stories in it.

Whenever I find a good rural business story I wan to share with you, I add it to my Buffer account. Buffer automatically spaces out my posts to @SBSurvival on Twitter at set times during the day. That keeps a bunch of tweets from going out all at the same time when I’m reading and clipping a lot of stories. So you’ll never see my Buffer account, just the tweets it posts to Twitter for me.

You can read my rural business tweets right on Twitter as @SBSurvival. They may come any time during the day, and sometimes I get behind and don’t share anything for awhile.

If you don’t like Twitter, I recommend reading SBSurvival on Twylah. It takes the links I share as @SBSurvival on Twitter and automatically makes a well-designed page of “trending” stories sorted by category. It looks much friendlier than a Twitter page, and you can drop in once a week or so to catch the top stories, instead of following all the time or once a day. So if you don’t like Twitter, but you want to see the stories, take a look at my @SBSurvival Twylah page.

The links I share as @SBSurvival on Twitter automatically go to Delicious, using a tool called Packratius. Delicious keeps a record of all the links I’ve shared. If I’m looking for a link I remember sharing on some particular subject, I can go to Delicious and search for it there. You can feel free to search my links there as well.

Because I know some of you are big fans of LinkedIn for social sharing, I use If This, Then That to share my @SBSurvival tweets to my personal LinkedIn profile. IFTTT takes every link on my Delicious and then posts the stories to LinkedIn. I used to have it post to my Facebook Page as well, but with the changes at Facebook making those far less visible, I don’t do that anymore. IFTTT is a terrifically powerful tool for connecting different online services and even some real-world tech together.

(Side note for techy-types: I started using Packrati.us and Delicous because IFTTT couldn’t capture directly from Twitter. That’s changed now, and you can use IFTTT to share tweets from Twitter to LinkedIn or many other services.)

Why I’m telling you

I have three reasons for telling you this process:

1. I want you to be able to find the links I share in whichever form you’d prefer to have them.
2. I want you think about all the different ways you can share information from your business to your customers. Your process will be different from mine. Ask your customers how they’d like to get their information.
3. Jackie Wolven asked me about my process.

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Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.

www.beckymccray.com

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