Consumers want quality content; social media users in particular. That’s why many of us go online – to read interesting and thought-provoking articles, see funny videos, to learn something new from a how-to guide, and so on.
Content curation for brands is all about offering value to your audience; and in return, you get to grow your profile, and increase your reach, followers, and engagement.
In this blog post, I’m going to share my favorite time-saving content curation tools – not just for saving time, but for improving your results too.
Why Use Content Curation in Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
I’ve already said how content curation can help you grow your online profile overall, in terms of social media followers and engagement as well as your own blogs’ readership and website traffic – not to mention it’s a great way to build up your social proof.
So, how do exactly does it do that and why should you use it?
One of the reasons why you should curate content is that you can’t always post your own content; well, you can – but in many cases, it appears overly promotional and can put off your audience.
As for the reason why content curation is so successful, it’s very simple: you’re giving your audience value – or, rather, you’re giving them what they want, which is quality content.
And as you give your audience what they want, that usually translates into them taking more action, whether it’s commenting on your social media posts or your blog, sharing your content, or engaging in any other way.
Content curation can ultimately help grow your profile, along with helping you grow your business, as well as your position as a thought leader in your industry and plus, it helps you create some useful connections with the influencers and thought leaders you’re helping to promote. Connections which can prove to be very valuable down the line as they might share your content too or you might work together on a marketing campaign.
And not to mention, curating content helps you save time, as you won’t have to create as much new content for your social channels – and as a business, you need to find ways to protect your time and other resources.
What Makes a Good Content Curation Strategy?
First and foremost, any content you curate needs to provide value. Value can come in a lot of different forms, not just education; it can be about providing your audience with an educational resource or it can be just about them having a good laugh at a video or funny meme, and anything in between.
The content you share also needs to be relevant to your audience: articles they would normally read, news that affects them or their work, subjects that they’re passionate about, or solutions to problems or needs that might have.
So long as you’re sharing quality content that is relevant to your audience, you’re on the right path.
However, it’s important to know that content curation isn’t just about sharing a link to some article you like; in order to build a more effective content curation campaign, you should:
- Edit your social media updates when sharing articles: share your own thoughts, make a comment on the subject, explain why you’re sharing that piece of content, and so on
- Create a collection of great content in one place (on your blog, a digital magazine, using a content curation tool); for example, a round-up of the best articles from the last month on a specific subject; or a collection of useful resources from different sources – and for each piece of content you add, write a few words about it too
As for how to curate content for your social profiles, here are some of the best time-saving tools for discovering amazing content:
Flipboard is a great option for finding awesome content, easily sharing it, as well as for creating your very own digital magazines. And it’s also available as an app for mobile devices – both iOS and Android – which is very convenient for when you’re on the go.
To get started with Flipboard, you can search through different interests to subscribe – the tool will then provide you with relevant content for each of your interests and at least in my experience, it’s always high-quality and new content which makes it ideal for sharing.
Another cool thing about Flipboard is that you can also create digital magazines where you curate content – these can generate followers (and you too can follow other people and magazines to help you find great content easier) and engagement, thus providing you with a new way to connect with your audience.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a full-suite social media management tool, which makes it better-suited for those who want to fully manage all of their social accounts in one place.
Apart from all the usual management features you’d expect – social media scheduling tools, monitoring, analytics, etc. – you can also very quickly pull content from your preferred websites:
All you need is the URL of the website and if it has an RSS feed, the tool will extract all the latest posts from that publication.
Then, select the social profile you want to post on and all the posts you want to publish. You can then either schedule the posts or add them to a queue to publish them automatically and even re-share them automatically if you want.
What’s great about the queue is that you can create multiple categories; this way you don’t have to mix curated content with the rest of your queued updates (such as blog posts, promotional posts, etc.).
Once you’ve picked the posts you want to share, you’ll also be able to edit and customize each one and add your own words to the update.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social, like Agorapulse, is a full suite social media management tool, with content curation features.
You have 2 ways to curate content on Sprout; one is to use your own online publications’ RSS feeds and pull content from them and the other is to search for content within the dashboard:
To find content, you can browse through relevant categories (which are also broken down into sub-categories to make the search easier).
For each post, you’re able to see the number of total shares and the shares for each social network. Once you’ve found something good, you can quickly edit the post and publish or schedule it.
PostPlanner
PostPlanner is a content curation tool built for social media marketing, and with some very useful extra features too.
In the PostPlanner dashboard, under Find, you’ll be able to browse through different categories of content:
As you can see, there are various categories to choose from, such as marketing articles, funny posts, interesting articles, quotes, and more; plus, you can also browse for content based on your industry, search for specific content by keyword, or curate content from Facebook Pages or Twitter handles you already know.
For each post, you’ll be able to see who shared and how many stars it has – based on the overall performance of the post so far on social media.
Any posts you like can be easily shared and scheduled and you can also customize them with your own text update and imagery (and even create an image from scratch with the Canva integration).
We’ve covered a lot of tools that help you find content, but there are times when you’ll find something very good by yourself, and you’d rather save it for later.
That’s where Pocket comes in – it’s basically a digital “pocket” where you can add any content you encounter online – on your browser, Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, etc. – so you can view it later or share it.
If you spend enough time browsing social media, you’re likely to find a lot of interesting content that would be relevant to your audience, but you can’t exactly share it anytime – this way, you’ll save it to properly review it and decide on when to share it and how to customize it.
Plus, it’s available on pretty much any device you want – iOS, Android, and other mobile devices, as well as any popular web browser.
Conclusion
Content curation is a great way to break up the monotony of too many promotional messages, as well as a way to save time (since you don’t have to create as much content of your own!). But it can actually be much more than just a time-saving technique – it’s also a way to boost your own profile, generate more engagement and more interest from your audience.
What does your social media content curation strategy look like? What tools do you use regularly?
Author bio
Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She’s a hugely connected and highly influential entrepreneur. She is listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers, named one of 10 top digital marketers by Brand24 and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. She is listed as the number one Influencer in the UK by Career Experts and is a recipient for a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business.
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