When it comes to being a social media manager, one of the key skills you need is the ability to share the right kind of content – You are responsible for the content that is shared on your social media accounts and the engagement you seek to drive with it. So it’s important that you put out the right messages before your audiences who may already be distracted by the myriad of information coming their way.
Social media has caused a significant shift in content consumption patterns. The sheer volume of information available via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the likes, makes it all the more challenging to get your content noticed. As a result, identifying quality content that’s unique and valuable to your audience becomes extremely important for success on social media.
A brief introduction to content curation
To put it simply, content curation involves combing through volumes of content to find something that would be of particular interest to your audience. But it doesn’t stop at that. Content curation is much more than just aggregating relevant content form the web. Quality curated content takes all the current perspectives on a subject, analyzes them and adds value through expert insights.
Content curation also offers a ton of benefits to your business. For starters, it helps you strengthen your relationship with the content producers, opening up opportunities to create content in collaboration with each other. Assuming you’re curating good content, it also establishes your business as an authority on a particular subject or even multiple subjects. It also saves you a significant amount of time and effort on creating original content. That said, it’s still important that you approach content curation as a supplement, and not a substitute to your content creation efforts.
So, how do you go about curating content effectively? Here’s a three-step strategy to help boost you social media marketing efforts.
1. Automate
While it’s true that the Internet is flooded with content, it’s also true that not all of it is share-worthy. Running manual searches for interesting content may be a good exercise to carry out in your spare time. But considering that social media managers don’t really get a lot of ‘spare time’ on the job, you need a more effective solution — think automation.
Content discovery and curation tools like DrumUp and Pocket are huge time-savers since they automate the process of identifying relevant content. So all there’s left for you to do is to just quickly review the content suggestions and share the ones that fit your content plan. Using automation also helps streamline your content curation activities. Rather than having to visit multiple sites each time you want to share a post, you can simply log into your dashboard and access multiple content suggestions in one place.
2. Assess
It is extremely tempting to judge an article by its headline when deciding whether or not you should share it. But, that’s a mistake that a lot of social media managers make and there is no reason why you should follow the pack too. In fact, there are plenty of reasons for you to actually go through the content that you’re about to post.
For starters, you might realize that the content isn’t all that great and not posting it might save you some trouble. Posting low quality content will ruin your brand’s image and reflect poorly on your business. Some pieces might have deceptive headlines with the actual content being far from what the title suggests. You might also come across language or visuals that don’t fall in line with your organization’s policies or brand image. Point being, you must make sure you review all content before you post it.
3. Distribute
Distributing your content is just as critical as curating it. Without a strategy for sharing content, there’s little you can achieve even with the best of it under your belt. When developing a content distribution strategy for social media, first identify the platforms that work best for your business. In this regard, the golden rule is to never over-commit. Based on the network preferences of your audiences, and the time and resources you have at hand choose a manageable number of platforms to build your presence on. Remember, having six-odd social accounts does sound great, but it also requires a proportionate amount of effort to curate and share content across all of them – nothing says social media failure louder than an inactive account.
It’s always a good idea to start off with fewer accounts and scale up gradually, once you feel like you’re in the groove. For instance, you could begin with the basic Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn trio and slowly bring Pinterest, Instagram, or any of the others into the fold. To optimize your social media management effort create a plan around your curation efforts, and schedule posts ahead of time. This will also ensure that your social pages remain active even when you need to be away.
Remember to schedule your posts at times when your audience is most likely to be active online. You can use social media analytics tools like Followerwonk to determine these time frames. Space your posts out reasonably so your followers aren’t spammed with notifications. If your audience is located across multiple time zones ensure that your schedule is inclusive and targets all of them.
Content curation can help amplify your voice on social media, since it lets you share more frequently and in a more targeted manner. With a steady rise in content consumption, curation has become all the more important as it helps provide a more holistic understanding of a given subject.
What’s your best tip for content curators?
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1TSfRL7 via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/22bOfXh
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