Content curation is a phrase that marketers often use to talk about sharing content that you didn’t create to your social media. As you probably know, sharing content on your website via a blog or landing page requires you to be pretty original about what you write so that you aren’t plagiarizing or violating copyrights. Sharing on social media is much easier, however, and doesn’t require any special citation, paraphrasing, or extra time spent researching and writing.
Sharing content on social media that’s not original or personalized to your business can still be strategic and effective. You just need to have a plan and follow some basic guidelines for social media best practices.
Create Your Social Media Plan
It helps to have guidelines in place internally to guide your posts so that you are consistent and know what type of personality and information to convey in your messaging. While you work through these details as you plan your social media strategy, brainstorming sources to follow can help you start your content curation.
Organize Your Content Sources
There are tools to help you follow and organize streams of content from various sources. Feedly is pretty easy to use and has a free basic account (which is all that most people will need). You can create a Feedly account and then start following different news sources and blogs. In order to stay organized, think about the main topics you want to cover and create lists before you start following anyone. It will save you time later.
For instance, an athletic shoe store may have a few lists like athletes, shoe news, fitness inspiration, and sporting events. In the athletes list, maybe they’ll follow sports news stories about Shalane Flanagan and Roger Federer. For shoe news, they could add streams from companies that are brands the store carries, and so on.
Plan Time to Review Content
Not much of the content in your streams will be things you share. You might click through ten articles before finding one that you think is right for your audience. That’s okay. As long as you have a little time to browse relevant news once a week, organized content curation can be a great supplement to your regular social media posts.
Pick What to Post and Get Posting!
Once you have at least one article to post to your social media, all you have to do is think of something to say and post it. If you’re using a scheduler like Hootsuite, your best option is to find several articles in one sitting. That way you can plan one to post every day for a week, or every couple days for the next week or more. It’s convenient and makes your social pages much more active.
Set Up Auto-Posting
Another option for posting social media from other sources is to use something like Twibble that will allow you to integrate an RSS feed to your Twitter and it will tweet for you based on parameters you set. The athletic shoe store, for example, may set up their Twibble account to automatically post tweets from the Competitor magazine RSS feed that include the word “shoe.” Since the store knows that Competitor magazine isn’t posting anything questionable, and often publishes interesting blogs about running shoes, the shoe store’s audience will likely enjoy some of that content. Once it’s set up, the shoe store marketing team won’t have to post that content, so it’s a big time-saver. (There are similar programs that can post RSS feed articles to Facebook and other social media pages, too, like Hootsuite or LinksAlpha.)
Those are the basics of what you need to know for content curation. Use the time that you spend on this process as a way to stay abreast of important news and trends in your industry, and you will both enjoy and benefit from efficient content curation!