How to Curate Content For Social Media To Help Boost Your Reach

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How to Curate Content For Social Media To Help Boost Your Reach

When people hear the word "curated content", it usually causes a few different reactions like: What the heck is it? Isn't that cheating? That's so much work. Shouldn't I be publishing my own content instead? Won't this cause us to drive traffic away from our site? Read on, no, no, not always, and no. In this blog post, you’ll learn;

What the definition of content curation is. How to curate content for your social channels. How to create a fast moving approval process allowing you to publish content faster.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get to reading our complete guide on social media content curation! What Is The Definition Of Content Curation? For the sake of this blog post, we'll use this definition from Curata: "Content curation is when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates, and shares relevant and high quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.” There are a variety of different ways that curated content can be used, but for the purposes of this post we're going to focus on curated content for social media. [Cookie "Get Your Free Content Curation Process || https://coschedule.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Blog-Breonna-CurateContent-mockup.png || Download Now || https://coschedule.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Content-Curation-Process-Checklist.docx.zip"] Why Should I Curate Content For Social Media In The First Place? There are many reasons a team will turn to using curated content for social media. #1. Your Marketing Team Can't Produce Enough Social Media Content On Their Own Social media requires a steady stream of professional, reputable content. Twitter alone should have about 15 unique posts a day (typically). By utilizing great curated content, you're able to fill those gaps more easily. [Tweet "How to Curate Content For Social Media To Help Boost Your Reach"] #2. Creating A Ton Of Your Own Internal Content Isn't A Priority For Your Team (Yet) If a marketing team is newly formed, trying to find time in your massive to-do list to create content is hard. I'm not gonna lie, when you first start blogging or writing a newsletter or crafting social media campaigns, it's hard. Not to mention time consuming. Using curated content can help provide content you can share (even if you don't have time to build it yourself just yet). #3. Curating Content Will Help You Establish And Build A Follower Base If you’re looking to build a follower base, curating content for social media is the way to do it. If you’re the first person to tweet out a really great source consistently, people will begin to turn to you because they know you share thought provoking content.

Recommended Reading: How to Schedule Your Social Media Content Curation for Massive Growth

How To Curate Content For Your Social Media Channels We’ve touched on what curated content is and why you should make it part of your social media content strategy. Now, we get to the how. How you curate your content will be the determining factor between your success and your failure. [Tweet "How you curate your #socialmedia content will determine your success or failure"]  #1. Find The Right Content Curation Sources Where you pull your sources from when you curate your content is incredibly important. You can go into Google and type in queries that you’re looking for. All that will get you is a giant page of search results that will make it impossible to stay on top of the latest trends. There are tools that will help you stay on top of your content and put you at the cutting edge of some of your favorite publishers. Your Facebook Page Newsfeed No, I don’t mean your personal newsfeed. Every Facebook business page is equipped with it’s own personal newsfeed. You can use that to your advantage by liking pages  in your industry that produce great content. How, you ask? I’m going to use the fake theatre company I created for one of my class projects. If you’re a Facebook page admin you should have a bar across the top of your screen that looks like this:   Click on the “Insights” tab. Once there, you should see a bar that says “Pages Feed”:   Clicking that will allow you to view every page that your Facebook page has liked, generating a feed of content. This is what my fake theatre company page looks like: So, say I wanted to add a new Broadway musical that posts really great content that I could share on my page. In the right hand corner is a button that says like other pages: Once you click that button a box should appear. Type in the page you  want to follow:   The page name will appear along with a list of suggestions.

Tip: Always triple check the page you select is the right one:

Click save and you're done! You can also edit the pages you’ve liked by clicked the pages liked by this page and selecting unlike page next to the pages you want to unfollow. From there Facebook will curate content from the pages you've liked into that feed. Then you’ll be able to post to your own Facebook page.

Recommended Reading: Facebook Marketing Strategy: Why You Need One (And How to Build It)

Twitter Lists Twitter lists are another great way to curate content for your social media feeds. I use Twitter lists to find up-and-coming content, or recent news that I think my followers would enjoy. You can do the same thing for your company’s Twitter feed. To start a Twitter list head to your profile and click Lists:   There you’ll see all the lists that you’ve created or that you’re following:   You can add new lists a few different ways but my favorite is to click the "Create New List" button in the right hand corner of your screen. You’ll be asked to give a name for your new list and select whether you want the list to be public (anyone who sees your Twitter feed can see or your list) or private (no one can see your list except for you). Adding people to you list is easy. Say I wanted to add Dear Evan Hanson to my Broadway Twitter list. Go to the account you want to add and hit the vertical three dot line next to the follow button. A pop up menu should appear asking if you want to add the profile to a list:   A small window will appear asking which list you want to add the account to. If the account is already in a list, the blue box will be marked:   Then you can head back to you list and see that the new account has been added. Their tweets will now stream into this specified feed. Feedly Feedly is one of the greatest content curation tools to have at your disposal. That’s no exaggeration. Feedly has a unique way of allowing users to follow news sources, keywords, industries, and more which will help users curate content. It’ll probably be more helpful if I just show you what I mean: From the homepage you can begin searching for different sources, create your own categories and create a robust content hub. For example, I have a Content Marketing category so I can keep up to date with the latest trends the content marketers are writing about. To create your category start with a generalized search. For this example I’m going to look for content on Disney. Because who doesn’t love Disney? So you start with your search keyword or phrase: You can add additional hashtags based on the suggestions below, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll just stick with Disney. Your search results should load and from there you’ll be able select resources that you want Feedly to curate content from: It looks like Disney Parks Blog has a great following and they produce some great content.  To add them to the list click the Follow button: From there you can add it to a current collection or create a collection:   Once you’ve named your collection it should appear in the sidebar: Once you have your selected sources in your collection, you’re able to start reading and selecting content to curate: Feedly does a great job of keeping track of what you’ve read, by greying out articles that have been clicked on:   Read the content, select your pieces, and share. It’s that easy.

Recommended Reading: How to Promote Your Blog With 107 Content Promotion Tactics

Buzzsumo BuzzSumo is a bit different kind of tool than Feedly. One thing they both have in common, though? They're great for doing content curation. Unlike Feedly, Buzzsumo has social integrations that allow users to see how often articles have been shared across social sites. So, say I wanted to look up the latest blog posts on content marketing. Type your query into the search bar:   From there BuzzSumo will start to filter in results based on the keywords you used. You can filter content in a variety of ways including content type, date published language and domains. Now let’s say I found this great article from Convince and Convert. I read it through and realize it would be great for my followers. But I don’t have time to send my social messages. You can save the article for later by clicking the save button:   Pretty smooth huh? The CoSchedule Content Curation Chrome Extension If you’re a CoSchedule user, you’ve got one more option to help you curate content for your social media channels. The CoSchedule Content Curation Chrome Extension. This tool will let you schedule your content right into your marketing calendar. No longer will  you have to have 17 tabs open on your computer trying to keep track of where you put one article. Nor will you have to worry about if one day is over scheduled on one social channel. Instead, you can see everything all in one place: When you’re using the chrome extension, there are a couple of things we would suggest doing to help organize your content even more. Use the color codes to identify where your curated content is:  Utilize ReQueue! It makes it easy to reshare evergreen content automatically and get even more life out of what you curate: In our saved views, set up a curated content view for easy click to view layout of when your content is publishing. Told you, you wouldn’t want to go straight to Google. #2. How To Identify Curatable Content Now you know how to properly curate your content, let’s talk about how to find the right content to curate to your audience. #1. Identify What Types Of Content Your Audience Likes To See Does your audience prefer videos or blog posts? How about quizzes or polls? Identify what resonates with your audience and try to curate your content types around that. But how do I know what my audience likes? Look back no more than six months into your social news feed history. Look for trends in what you’re audience responded to. If you see a 35% increase in engagement when you post videos, focus on curating video content posts. Look to your audience, they’ll tell you what they want to see. [Tweet "Curating content? Ask your audience what they want to see."] #2 Make Sure The Content You Post Is From A Reputable Source I can’t stress this enough. Any content that you curate needs to come from a reputable source. No one wants to read  poor, boring, or inaccurate content. So, no matter what industry you’re in, check your sources. A great way to check and see if your content is coming from a reputable source is the MozBar plugin for Chrome. The browser extension will score the website’s Domain Authority, giving you a better idea if the site you are on is a reputable one. The higher the score, the better, although sometimes new sites will have low scores (until they have time to build authoritativeness). #3. Make Sure The Content You Curate Is Well Rounded And Thorough Raise your hand if you hate clicking on an article, only to find out it’s click bait or doesn’t answer the posed question. No one likes reading content that has been half-heartedly done. When you’re curating content, make sure that the content you’re sharing matches the same quality of content that you’re creating. Usually I ask myself the following before I schedule an article: Did the author clearly answer the posed question? Can I write my own unique and compelling social message to complement this content? Was the content easy to read and follow?

Recommended Reading: How to Develop a Successful Social Media Advocacy Program

You Have All The Information You Need, But It Looks Like A Lot Of Work Yup, curating content is a lot of work. Even if you were to create a curated content for social media approval list, it would probably look like this: Every six months: Determine if content resources we’re using are pulling content we need. Every month: Meet and create themes around to curate your content around Every week: Review sources that will be publishing next week Everyday: Check sources for new content to curate Ok, nobody, not even your intern has enough time in their schedule to complete this task list. So cut it down by doing the following. Designate your content curator Meet with them once a week to teach them about what types of content to curate (maybe even share this blog with them) Meet once a week for three weeks to check over curated content that has been selected by the team Afterwards you should only meet once a month to determine new themes for content Suddenly your meeting list has dropped dramatically. Im going to quote Nathan Ellering, our Demand Generation Lead, here. “If you can’t train your team to think like you, you’re wasting time.” Don’t waste time. Train your team so you can trust them. 7 Examples of Quality Curated Content So, what does quality social media content curation look like? Get an idea with these seven examples. Every one of these posts does the following things: Shares something from a reputable source. Adds its own perspective with custom post copy. Adds value for each brand's audience. #1.  Convince and Convert   #2. RealTruck.com #3.  Passion Planner #4. Cambria Quartz #5. Buzzfeed #6. Lemonly #7. Sanford Health   Now Take This Guide and Curate Some Content! That's it! You have all you need to start curating great content for your social media accounts. And if you're interested in trying CoSchedule, set up a demo today!

The post How to Curate Content For Social Media To Help Boost Your Reach appeared first on CoSchedule Blog.

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