As a business owner/marketer, keeping your social pages active can be challenging. The organic visibility of social posts has considerably declined over the past few years.
It’s, therefore, necessary to have a regular publishing schedule to ensure that your business gets the desired organic visibility among your target audience. With limited budget and time to produce content at scale, you can always supplement content production with smart content curation.
“55% of B2B Marketers have small or single-person marketing teams.” - (Source)
It’s a time-saving tactic to keep helping your audience consistently. The technique also helps you to stay abreast of the very latest in your niche.
I interviewed some experts to compile the following tips for more effective content curation.
1. Reach Out To Experts
One way to curate great content is by collecting responses from experts in your field. You can use a tool like HARO to help find experienced professionals to contribute to round-up posts. Alternatively, you can also reach out to experts directly.
To find these people, you can type your topic in the Google search bar and reach out to authors who have already written on it. Email them about your story with a request for a tip or a quote.
You can compile your influencer list in an Excel sheet and then use a tool like Voila Norbert to find their emails quickly.
-- Cody Slingerland, Founder Jawfish Digital
2. Curate Content That’s Unique
For me, content curation is a great way to switch things up, offer new angles on certain topics for my followers and even network with peers. I have been using content curation for both my agency and our clients. Here are some effective tips:
Be Selective: Don’t use someone's content just because it comes from a powerful influencer. Make sure that it's on-brand and provides real value to your audience.
Go for 'underground' content: Everybody reads content from top publications. Spend some time to find truly valuable content from new bloggers and media outlets.
If you want to automate a part of this process, you can always use tools like BuzzSumo and Curata. But the trouble is that they are not so great for 'underground' content. My go-to sources for content that hasn't been overshared are Reddit (there's literally a subreddit for anything) and Hacker News.
-- Adriana Tica, CEO Idunn
3. Subscribe To Popular Content
My process is fairly simple. I've got Pocket installed on my phone and my browser. This allows me to save an article to refer to later on. Every time I come across an interesting piece, I 'add it to my Pocket'. I’ve signed up to the best of marketing newsletters and blogs so it's not too hard to find great content.
I schedule content for the coming week using Buffer. I also use Ritetag to choose a hashtag that will help the post to get more exposure. The Ritetag Chrome Extension means I don't need to leave Buffer when choosing a tag. When I've shared an article, I tag it as 'used' in Pocket so I can easily avoid posting it twice.
-- Louisa McGrath, Content Manager Rebrandly
4. Make Use Of Content Curation Tools
There are quite a few tools that you can use for content curation.
- LittleBird: for finding content that’s being shared by experts.
- Feedly: To find popular blogs in your niche.
- Reddit: To know what your audience is interested in talking about.
- Google Alerts: To follow content related to specific keywords.
-- Whitney Meers, Strategist Concrete Blonde Consulting
5. Find Content That’s Audience-centric
Content curation starts with knowing exactly what your audience wants.
Analyse previously published content pieces on your social media pages and see what worked and what didn't.
After assessing user-preferences, look for the right content pieces. One tool I use is Zest. It's a Chrome extension that displays already curated marketing-related content.
-- Alexandra Cote, Content Marketer Paymo
6. Co-create A Database Of Useful Content
My tip for content curation would be to make use of monitoring tools for finding content in your niche. We recommend Buzzsumo, Ahrefs Content Explorer, Mention, and Google Alerts.
As a longer-term strategy, you can review these mentions weekly and keep a spreadsheet of all the relevant content. Add the URL, the author’s name, their social handles and ideally, a short summary. You may also want to categorize it by content type. This way, you’ll have an evolving list of useful content that’s ready-to-use. You’ll almost certainly end up spotting trends as well.
-- Dave Gregory, Content Marketing Manager SiteVisibility
7. Curate Inspiring Customer Stories
Satisfied customers are one of the richest sources of content ideas a content strategist can draw from. You can post their picture/video on Instagram, or invite them to contribute a guest post to your blog.
Featured customers are likely to share their contribution with their social networks. Curating customer-created content amplifies your content’s reach as well as customer loyalty.
-- Stuart Ridge, Chief Marketing Officer VitaMedica
8. Use A Tool Like Contentgems
I use a content curation tool called ContentGems. The free version gives me new and interesting articles (up to 30 per folder) delivered to my inbox, every day. The tool allows you to choose your topics and keywords. It also gives you the option to share your content.
-- Ben M Roberts, Head of Marketing Talkative
9. Send Curated Newsletters
Sifting and sorting through the best content on the web can be time-consuming.
Personally, I know where I want to get my news from and who I want to follow. But I prefer to outsource the job to Quuu; choose your topics and they’ll email you a daily selection of relevant content that you can choose to share.
Nuzzel is another app that highlights popular content your social network is sharing. I use Zapier to get RSS feeds from my favorite blogs and to organize my Pocket list. Buffer and Hootsuite help you to schedule your curated content at optimal times.
I encourage content curators to look beyond social media and start building their email subscriber-base with a service like Revue. I have my Pocket list integrated with the email tool so I can easily pick the content I wish to share in my newsletter.
-- Quentin Aisbett, founder OnQ Marketing
10. Focus On Adding Value
I often see people simply re-post info from an article they just read. My advice would be to make sure you add your own thoughts and insights while sharing a content piece. The most important element is to add value. You might quote certain snippets of an article, but you must also communicate your point of view along with it.
-- Marc Brookland, Founder SEO Locale
Over To You
Content curation is certainly a good way to add more value to your content marketing efforts. It can’t replace original content but it can surely work to complement it and drive more leads for your business. While curating content you must look to solve audience pain points and find unique content from lesser-known sources. Do make use of the right tools and automate your curation process; that will surely save you a lot of time. You can create a centralized database of relevant content within the organization to scale up easily and efficiently. Last but not the least, you must reach out to experts and include some of their valuable tips in your content pieces.
I hope this round-up was helpful. I would love to learn from your experience. Please do add your thoughts in the comments section below.