The same way galleries have curators who choose items to display, and radio stations have DJs that select songs to play, businesses can also curate articles, videos, pictures, and stories for their audience.
Part of an effective content strategy is sharing great content produced by others. That said, even with the vast resources of the internet, finding epic content worthy of your audience can be difficult. To help you in your search, I have compiled a list of my favorite places to curate content.
Social Networks
Part of an effective content strategy is sharing great content produced by others. That said, even with the vast resources of the internet, finding epic content worthy of your audience can be difficult. To help you in your search, I have compiled a list of my favorite places to curate content.
Facebook Groups
The groups you belong to on Facebook can be a great source for industry-related, crowd-sourced content. In addition to providing excellent content curation suggestions, Facebook Groups will also let you know which profiles to follow.
Target conversations that are focused on your industry or relate closely to your business offerings. Be certain to set-up and monitor your notifications to learn what is being said and shared in your Facebook groups.
Trying to find quality content in a busy Twitter feed can be challenging. To slow things down, and specifically target the content you need, make use of Twitter’s lists and hashtags.
Lists
A Twitter list allows you to create an organized news feed that is focused on a specific topic. I recommend that you create Twitter lists that target influencers, industry news sources, or users that consistently share brand-related topics. Be sure to review your lists daily.
Hashtags
A way to find great content is with a hashtag search. Choose keywords that are closely related to your business/brand, and perform a Twitter search with the word/s hashtagged; for example #thesewords.
You can sort your hashtag search results by top tweets, latest tweets, people, photos, videos, news, and more.
Linkedin Pulse
The Pulse news section of LinkedIn offers lots of relevant content for you to share with your network.
LinkedIn allows you to follow thought leaders, channels and publications, then based on who you follow, Linkedin will notify you when new content is published.
Also, the “Top Posts” section of Pulse is a great place to find insightful and entertaining information for your audience. The posts featured in this area have managed to accumulate a lot of engagement and have proven their value. How to posts and listicles are two types of content that consistently perform well on the platform.
I’m sure many would agree that Pinterest is the easiest social media platform on which to curate content. Use pins to curate images, items, moments, or even a quote.
Because Pinterest is also a search engine, you can use search terms to discover content to share. For every category that you blog about, search those words on Pinterest. When looking through the search results, pin any related articles to a secret board to share later on other social networks.
“Pinterest never lets me down for great content when I search.” – Peg Fitzpatrick, 9 Ways The Pros Curate Content For Success
Google offers some powerful tools to help you identify and collect information that will appeal to your audience. Two such tools are Google Alerts and Google Hot Trends.
Alerts
The Alert tool from Google is great for identifying topical content to share. Google Alerts allows you to create a Google search and have updates emailed to you weekly, daily, or as they happen. Be specific when choosing an Alert; broad search terms are not very effective.
Trends
The Google Trends tool uses real-time search data to help you assess consumers’ search behavior over a period of time. As an addition to Google Trends, the Hot Trends feature displays the top 20 hot, fastest rising searches of the past hour, in various countries. This tool is great for identifying searches that have recently experienced a sudden surge in popularity.
Newsletters
The best examples of a great newsletter contain a balance of original and curated content. In the most appealing newsletters, the information provided in the curated sections compliments the business’ original content. It is a partnership.
By subscribing to industry-leading newsletters you can expect to receive a great collection of informative posts/articles. This will provide a constant supply of educational and entertaining content to share with your audience.
Blogs
Blogging has given a voice to millions of Internet users across the globe. Some of those voices have risen above the others. These are the people and publications that have emerged as industry leaders and influencers.
Generally speaking, the information that these leaders share in their blogs is informative, insightful, and innovative. Where possible, use this content to legitimize the value of your own products or services.
Influencers
Make the effort to identify the influencers in your niche. Look for thought leaders that:
- your audience already considers sources of meaningful information, and
- create content which compliments the message you are sharing.
The majority, if not all, of the influencers you discover will be making contributions to a blog; find it and follow it closely for updates. Also, an underappreciated source of interesting content can be found in the blog’s comment section.
Industry Publications
Because of their well-established track record of providing insights, industry-leading resources like Mashable, Forbes, and Ted Talks can be relied upon to consistently deliver content that is enticing, entertaining, and educational.
Watch for content that provides deeper insights into your industry, products, or services. Sharing related, relevant content with your audience can add credibility to your own message.
Reddit & Subreddit
Home to unique and interesting content, Reddit – the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet” – is often the place where viral hits are discovered. This is why websites like BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and Gawker monitor it closely.
Use the Reddit website search to find site-wide mentions of your keywords. Within the results you will see a list of individual communities, called subreddits, where your search term appears most frequently. Subscribe to all the subreddits that are closely related to your brand, products or services.
You may filter subreddits by “Top” and then by time period (all-time, monthly, this week, etc). By default, the front page of a subreddit is determined by how popular or “hot” a post is.
Summary
One of the greatest challenges you face is not being able to generate enough quality content for your audience. Content curation allows you to share information that is consistent with your brand message, without using your limited resources to create it.
By actively sharing interesting, entertaining and thoughtful content in social networks, you create opportunities to engage your audience. In doing so, you will not only increase the number of visitors to your website, you will also attract more followers to your social media profiles.
Frequently sharing high-quality content on social networks is one strategy for staying visible and gaining attention. Great curators build trust with their audience and become an indispensable resource.
With nowadays information overload, it becomes harder to separate what’s worth reading and what should be ignored. This is where great curators are needed.
Although there are many tools that make content curators’ job easier, human involvement is still the most important factor in curating great content. Building a relationship with audience members, assessing content on an individual basis, and finding the right balance of creation and curation, will determine how well your message is received.
Not to be confused with “Newsjacking,” which is simply capitalizing on a popular news story by featuring it, the key to great content curation is context. Giving the post context, by offering your own perspective, makes it new and interesting. Despite the fact that the content you are sharing is not original, a hand picked, curated collection of content will always be unique.
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