Anyone who aims to drive a successful social media marketing effort will need to get comfortable with content curation. Content has become the glue that holds the whole social marketing process together.
It is not enough to write and promote your own content.
- To establish expertise in your field, you need to read, understand, filter, and share good materials from other smart people or companies.
- This is the whole premise behind content curation.
It is easy to get online, set up some social profiles, and start sharing to your heart’s content. But like anything, there’s a right and a wrong way to curate content.
- There are many ways to figure out who your target audience is. If you lack budget, it’s okay to make a guess and testing to see if your gut was correct. You can adjust as you go.
You built your product or service to meet a specific need.
Content curation is meant to serve a specific audience, and you may or may not be a member of that target segment. Be sure to share for them, and not just based on what you like.
- To succeed at content curation, it’s important to become a resource for your target audience.
- There are wide ranging opinions about how frequent you should be pushing out content, but frequency can vary.
- They key is to be consistent – you don’t want to burst out a ton of links at one time each day or week and then vanish from the social web the rest of the time.
- Users are online at different times, and it is important to spread out your curation over hours and days. If you want to be a content curation resource, plan to stick with it and make it a priority.
Obviously, life and work will require you to be away from the computer at certain times. You can’t be tethered to a device 24×7. But you need to spread out sharing over days and hours.
This is where content curation tools come into play. There are many tools available that provide scheduling features for your content curation efforts.
- Although it is okay to take a few liberties with content curation so long as it suits your target audience, it is important to maintain a theme.
- For example, my company specializes in SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, and Social Media Strategy.
- If you observe how we curate content on Twitter, you will see a heavy focus on these topics and similar subject matter.
Some companies simply automating tweets and shares from specific web properties.
Efficiency matters, which is why we have content curation tools in the first place. But content curation and automation are completely different strategies.
- Successful curators take the time to personally review and evaluate the content items before sharing them.
- There’s no way to automate selectivity with content, and you need to share only the most insightful or inspiring materials to become a trusted resource for your target audience.
- If you want your audience to stay engaged and interested, you will need to mix up the sources of content when sharing it. This is part of the issue with automating content sharing – if you pick 2-3 sites and simply share everything they post, why should anyone follow you?
- As soon as they realize you’re just sharing a couple of sites, most people will go to those websites directly for the content.
When you share remarkable and interesting content from a wide range of sites, your effort becomes follow-worthy.
Don’t Just Share Big Media Content
If you look at the top sites shared, you will see that Upworthy, Mashable, The Huffington Post, and other huge media names are already being shared widely with or without your help.
We all love to share great content from sources that are not already peppered all over the social web. It’s fine to share from the big names, but mix it in with links from websites that your target audience may be excited to find. This type of discovery is one of the biggest benefits you can offer your audience during your content curation efforts.
Content curation can serve a stellar role as a conversation starter.
If time is limited, it’s fine to merely share the materials and move on. But at least some of the time, take a few seconds to comment on why you think a piece of content is especially of note.
Content curation is the key to successfully marketing yourself on social media. Instead of blindly sharing content or automating the process, put in the time and effort to build out the right content and processes.
Source: www.socialmediatoday.com/content/content-curation-9-things-keep-mind-0