Social marketing strategies vary and opinions about them differ. There is only one obvious thing about them – to grow your audience, you must share interesting, useful, and original content. Creating good content takes a lot of you precious time – you have to spend hours on research, writing, and promoting it.
But what if you don’t have any audience at all and all the content creating process is just a waste of time for you? Then you are in a trap! But we know the way out.
There are still ways to spend less time and effort especially when you learn how to use the blogs of others to attract audience and build your own business. In this article we will talk about content curation, its benefits, and some excellent resources and tools to use to achieve better results.
Content curation: what is it?
Simply speaking, content curation is based on reviewing and filtering blog posts and articles from the blogs of other people and businesses across the Internet.
Please, mind that content curation is NOT plagiarizing other people’s ideas.
Every time you locate interesting links, texts, images, videos etc. at your Twitter or Facebook account, you are curating content. However, a global curation strategy is more than just sharing important and interesting facts in your social media profile with your friends. In terms of business, curation is an entire system of content gathering which requires strict publishing schedule and rules.
In a word, to escape the burden of constant writing, creating, and blogging, you can use the content of other blogs fair and square. When you see a long and detailed blog post composed by some other author, it is pretty simple to write a small comment or your opinion about it. If you do so and locate a link to a post you are commenting on, you will get a new piece of content, composed on your own, but built on someone else’s idea. Still this content is original and valuable for your audience and you actually give a reference to an initial author.
For example, retweeting and sharing on Facebook are the most commonly used and simple types of content curation. There is no need to come up with your own tweet when you have others to do that for you. Just select the most important news, share them, and you will be a part of the information stream. However, the content you share is still considered as your own, built on the thoughts and ideas of people you follow.
Simply speaking, in our modern world we have a huge overload of information and opinions, especially online. Internet allows everyone to publish their ideas and share them. So you cannot avoid talking about the same issues, news, events, and ideas at the same time as others. Why producing another post on a topic that’s been discussed millions and millions of times before? There are people who have already done a great job with their research, expressions, and ideas. Make the best use of these materials and you will see that it is just as great as your own.
Of course, we are not trying to say that content curation can replace the need to produce your own tweets and posts. If your blog is filled only with links and small remarks, people will not feel like that they are reading a real person. Including your unique large posts in the mix is essential. But curation is a great practice when you need to fill in the gaps, overcome creative crisis, and stay relevant all the time. When you face a lack of ideas, use this strategy to keep up with your regular publishing schedule.
Some useful curation practices
Now we will talk about the benefits of content curation and ways it can help you produce more content in less time.
Small recaps of large pieces of information
Curation allows you to deliver the most useful information to your audience by gathering together different opinions. To attract users to your content, you are free to combine different opinions on some topics in a single post. Gather a multitude of opinions by other bloggers on the same issue and publish them in a form of a many-sided post. But be careful – don’t make a Holy War out of it!
You will get the point
The more content you filter to find some pearls, the faster you will get a better insight into the creative process. With this info at hand, you will learn to express and share your own thoughts better. Moreover, you will learn the preferences of your target audience by having a better understanding of their range of interests.
High speed
Obviously, curation is always faster than content creation. Fast reaction will help you to be one of those early voices when delivering news to the news feeds. As a rule, this leads to higher search results, popularity, and follow-up posts. This is a good practice to attract more audience and build better brand awareness when you need to promote your business blog.
Share the love
When you share content from the others blogs, you give them credit and therefore drive traffic to the initial source. When you promote someone else’s material, authors benefit from it. In turn, they might make something similar for you later.
Tools and websites
Locating existing content in your blog also includes using some useful websites, resources, and tools for better results. Some of them are great for idea gathering, while the others are better for the technical part. Let’s take a closer look.
Ideas
When you are following a curation strategy, make sure to know your audience. In short, this includes being aware of their age and lifestyle, pains, desires, and interests. For example, if your audience is young – high school, college, and university students – present information that they might find useful. StudentShare’s blog includes detailed articles about paper writing, college issues, and other stuff that interests students at all times. Instead of writing a brand new “How to…” guide about something that has been already discussed a million times before – use the posts of such blogs as StudentShare and others.
As it has been said earlier, social media marketing requires conforming to a strict schedule. At times when you have a crisis and lack of ideas – use common and ever-green content for your curation. For example, give your audience something interesting to read that is not related to your business. This will build more human-like relationships between your potential customers and you. When you browse websites like How Stuff Works and find articles about some things that are somehow related to your business – don’t miss’em! Share the info in your blog! For example, if your business is about selling sneakers, find an article “How to power your mp3 player with your running sneakers” or something like that. Your audience will love it.
Technical part
For the technical part, try using Cadmus. This tool shows you the most popular tweets from your own network. Cadmus analyzes the most “shared” and “liked” posts in your news feed and places the most important ones at the top. This tool considers a number of criteria such as total reposts, reposts within your community, which reposts are engaging (via tag @reply, etc) and more. Cadmus updates automatically when you log in to your account. It means that if you log in at least once a day – you receive a ready-to-use curated news feed that includes the most popular and important information from your social media community. In this case, following well-known people in your sphere will be beneficial.
Addict-o-matic is a tool used for global news search. This program works with the web, which is significantly wider than your news feed. By means of Addict-o-matic you will be able to find the latest popular posts, news, images, and videos to keep up with the most trending topics and to locate links to these sources in your own blog.
This one is a really quick tool to help you find news and interesting content in a matter of seconds. HeadSlinger scans the headlines of articles located on the platforms and websites you pre-set and places the news into simple folders for you to read. Despite the fact that the process sounds to be overly complex, it takes less than a minute to finalize it.
Summary
Content creation is a process that requires special attention. Of course, there are lots of ways to motivate yourself and to get inspired to write posts regularly. But with the content curation strategy, your content production will become not only easier, but also more efficient.
Coming up with a good strategy that suits your business takes a bit of extra time and effort. However, the payoff is long-standing and significant. When all of the important information is in your hands, it becomes easier to create fresh content for your readers.
Curation will save your social media marketing from drowning in tons of useless information. In short, it is quite beneficial to use curation because it helps you create better content spending less time. Try using the above curation tools and pieces of advice we have shared with you and good luck!
1 Comment
Alecia Stringer · August 23, 2016 at 9:33 pm
Thanks for the resources. I’ll check them out. Always be growing and building!