In a perfect world, you could fill a calendar with unique content to share on your social media channels!
Reality: Unless your job is a full-time content creator, no one has enough time in their day to be creating unique content AND doing their full-time job!
Cue content curation. Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Using content curation, you can save yourself valuable time, create engaging content for your audience and also help build your online community by sharing other people’s great content, recognizing other thought leaders/experts, and help others discover new people to follow.
Whenever you share, you get something back. After all, sharing is caring.
Remember, when creating your social media calendar, to consider the social media rule of thirds:
- ⅓ brand promotion
- ⅓ curated content
- ⅓ about conversations happening on social media
Keep in mind, content curation isn’t automated and it should be an ongoing, scheduled task.
Now let’s get started curating content.
Step #1: Define your audience
Do you know who your audience is? Not just the audience you’ve created as a part of your brand’s marketing strategy, but also the audience that you are actually engaging with on social media. Take into account both. Who you are trying to reach, and who you are already reaching.
Look at your personas from your marketing strategy. What social platforms are they active on. What questions/problems are they struggling with. Then look at the demographic data provided by the social media platforms. How are the two sets of audiences similar? How are they different? Keep in mind that each social media platform may also have slightly different audiences that you may need to cater to.
Step #2: Get the tools to help you
There are tons of free and paid tools to help you more easily curate content. Here are a few of our favourites:
Google Alerts
Google allows you to save searches for news and create an alert when your keyword or queries appear. Simply type in the search bar and at the bottom of the first page of search results click on “Save search”. You can then select how often you want to be notified and other filters.
Newsletters
Sign up for the newsletter to receive content directly to your inbox. Consider signing up for newsletters from associations, influencers, experts, news outlets, etc.
You can use Twitter to follow certain keywords via the use of hashtags (#).
Pinterest is a great curator for visual content. Create boards (hidden or public) that you can organize some of your content ideas into for reference later.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo offers both free and paid versions. But you can do some basic searches for content within the past year using the free version. Buzzsumo also shows you the number of social engagements it’s received from Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. It also shows whether the content is evergreen or not (to keep your curated content timely). You can also use some of their filtering (not all because some is reserved for paying clients) to pull out only “how-to” articles, or only infographics.
Feedly
Finally, Feedly allows you to follow feeds based on topic, website or RSS feeds. You can then save to boards for easy reference, and add your insights for the future. It also allows you to follow Google Alerts (mentioned above) here as well. Feedly also helps you narrow down your topic by providing related topics.
Step #3: Gather Content
Now that you are set up to gather content, a few things to keep in mind when deciding which content to curate for your brand.
- Is it useful to your audience?
- Does it build value for your brand?
- Is it timely? Or is it evergreen?
- Is it well written?
- Is it vetted? From a trusted source?
Step #4: Personalize
Once you’ve selected some curated content, you are ready to personalize it for your own brand. Simply sharing a piece of content won’t help you garner the engagement you want. You need to help your audience understand why you think the piece of content is important, or interesting? Why it’s relevant and important for them to read it. Add value to the piece of content by personalizing it for your audience and associating it with your brand.
Step #5: Schedule
To schedule or not to schedule? It’s a great question, and a pretty easy one to answer – let the timeliness of the content decide for you. Got a hot piece of news to share, don’t schedule, curate, personalize and send. Have an evergreen piece of content? Add to your social media calendar and use a scheduling tool (like Hootsuite) to send out at a later date.
TIP: Don’t forget to give credit to the original content owner
You also want to set a schedule for yourself to be curating on a daily or weekly basis, so set a recurring calendar reminder.
Step #6: Listen
Finally, once you start adding curated content to your social media calendar, watch to see how it performs in comparison to other content. See which content is working and what isn’t. It may perform better on one channel, but not on another. Don’t forget, your goal isn’t to just put out as much content as possible. Its to grow a deeper connection with your audience and in turn generate more business!
Have you tried content curation? How is it working for you? Leave a comment or connect with us on social media: https://www.bedigitalgiants.com/contact-us/