Are you using content curation effectively?
In this article, we’ll show you how to populate your content calendar with valuable content that will resonate with your audience – and save huge amounts of time doing it.
First Up – What is Content Curation, Exactly? 🤔
Successful content curation is essentially sorting through the vast amounts of content out there on the web, looking at it through the lens of your audience and cherry-picking pieces to share that will be relevant, helpful or entertaining for them.
What Are the Benefits?
- Save Time ⌚
Using SmarterQueue’s Find Content feature will ensure the content curation process is streamlined and efficient, allowing you to focus more of your time on other tasks, like crafting your own original content, or attacking the countless other items on your to-do list.
- Build Relationships 👯♂️
Don’t forget that other people love their content being shared – it’s like the ultimate compliment. So make sure you tag them on social to let them know! Soon enough you’ll build up strong relationships, which will mean they’re more likely to share your stuff, too. Boom, you’re networking.
- Inspiration ✨
As you’re unearthing all this content, you’ll almost certainly find flashes of inspiration for your own content marketing efforts.
- Develop Authority 📢
If you’re consistently sharing high-quality content (both curated and original), over time you’ll build a reputation as a trusted source, and people will look to you for answers.
Know What You’re Looking For 🔎
As with any form of marketing, you’ll need to know who you’re aiming to reach. What does your audience respond well to? What content resonates with them? What challenges do they have that curated content can help them solve? Keep your followers in mind at all times.
Identify Topics
OK, so you know exactly who you’re aiming your content to, now you just need to find some great stuff to share. Come up with a list of five relevant topics. For example, at SmarterQueue ours might look like this:
- Content marketing
- Social media strategy
- Copywriting
- SEO tips
- Blogging
You may have more, may have less. These are the topics around which you want to find content to share.
Add Your Sources
You might already have a list of trusted websites you frequent for high quality articles. Don’t worry if it’s a lengthy list – SmarterQueue can import your Feedly bookmarks or mobile bookmarks (iOS only) direct into the tool so you’ll have easy access to them. Alternatively, add them via RSS and save them as a source.
Time Saving Tip: You can search within your bookmarked sources for particular search terms, which will save you sifting through irrelevant articles.
We’ll come back to these bookmarks later. For now, it’s time to unearth some fresh content to engage your audience with.
SmarterQueue’s Find Content feature not only lets you search entire Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts for specific content, but it also enables you to search by #hashtag, @mention, or within your Twitter lists.
Let’s look at the content curation process in practice:
- Type your keyword into the ‘Find Content’ search box.
- In the dropdown, you’ll see a ‘Search Twitter’ option.
- SmarterQueue will display all Tweets from the last seven days containing your chosen search term, in chronological order.
- Easily discover the most popular content by changing the sorting option to ‘Most Retweeted’ or ‘Most Liked’, and you’ll see the most popular posts around your chosen topic from the last seven days.
- From here, you can browse through the results and add posts to your Queue.
- The Bulk Import option makes it even more efficient to add multiple posts at once.
- Choose whether you’d like the posts to go out once, or select Evergreen Recycling to queue them multiple times.
- Save your search as a Source, and it’ll appear in your left-hand bar alongside your Bookmarked Sources, remembering your chosen filtering options so you’ll be able to access the most engaging content around your search topic at the touch of a button. Magic.
- Decide what you’re going to do with all this extra time you’ve gained each week! 🕐
Quality Control 🏆
Hold up! While we’re all about saving time, we want to make one thing clear. In order to genuinely be a master at content curation, you have to consume the content yourself first.
It’s not enough to simply find a selection of posts and skim the headlines – your aim is to become a trusted source of high-quality information, so do the necessary checks to ensure you actually endorse, or have an opinion on, the content you’re sharing.
It might be that you want to start a discussion around a topic you have a different viewpoint on: this can add extra value by provoking debate (hello, engagement!), meaning you’re not just contributing to the social media echo chamber.
The extra perk of being a connoisseur of content in this way is that you’ll get SO. MUCH. INSPIRATION. Not only will you become (even more) knowledgeable in your field, you’ll almost certainly find that pieces you’ve read will spark ideas for your own original content.
Just don’t forget to note your ideas down so you remember them! 📝
Curate the Curators 💡
Once you’ve set up your Sources, you’ll have a steady stream of fresh content to check in on regularly. You can organise your Sources into folders – why not try creating a folder of trusted curators, to bring even more content from around the web in one place? 📂
Play by the Rules
When sharing someone else’s content, it’s important to credit the original author. Not only is it good practice, it’ll also mean you forge relationships with related influencers and authors in your field. It’s a win-win situation. 💁
Discover Influencers with SmarterQueue
As well as identifying relevant content to post, SmarterQueue’s Find Content feature also suggests related Twitter and Facebook pages related to your keyword. Type in your keyword, select any profile or page in the drop-down and browse their latest posts, sorted by most recent or most engagement. You can also search within the posts for a specific keyword.
There is a lot of content out there: knowing how to approach it can be daunting. But as you can see, once you’ve laid the foundations, you’ll have a consistently updated treasure trove of high quality content to keep you Queue topped up with.
Summary
- Keep your audience in mind at all times
- Identify clear topics
- Quality control
- Credit original authors
- Test and refine
- Be inspired!
Not using SmarterQueue for your social marketing activities yet? Sign up for a free trial and see what all the fuss is about.
