Content curation is a vital facet of strategic social media marketing. Content curation is the practice of discovering, collecting and sharing relevant, high-quality content across your social media channels. A social media presence is no longer optional. If you want your company to be taken seriously, a presence on at least the big four social networks—Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn—is required. It is important to realize that just having social media accounts is not enough; it is merely the first step to social media success. Smart content curation is valuable to others and can go a long way in helping you build a significant social following as well as increase your social lead generation. There are numerous resources for discovering high-quality content to share on your social media channels.
How Much Content Curation Is Enough?
Aim to curate and share at least ten pieces of content on Twitter each day. Or, if you can make the comittment, consider tweeting four times per hour around the clock like Jeff Bullas does for increased engagement. For Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, two pieces of curated content will suffice. Always cite the author’s name—using his or her Twitter handle or a link to the author’s page on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+. Your content curation should be spaced out throughout the day between 9 am and 6 pm at a minimum.
Using a social media management dashboard, such as HootSuite, allows you to schedule your posts ahead of time, which streamlines the social sharing of your content. Share your curated content on social media Monday through Friday each week at least.
7 Resources for Social Content Curation
1. Topsy
Topsy is an analytic tool, which identifies industry thought leaders and trending content. To earn status as a thought leader, you must have deep industry knowledge and be genuinely engaged in industry discourse. Topsy helps you identify influencers by keyword, company name, person or category and discover which content topics are trending for your industry. You can even analyze the degree of influence content creators have on certain keywords, see what they have written and shared on social networks, and what others have published about these influencers. Topsy can bring increased focus to your social content curation.
2. Social Media Today
Social Media Today hosts content from “the world’s best thinkers on social media.” SMT is highly selective about what it chooses to publish; the website is a top-notch destination for discovering relevant and insightful content for your content curation needs.
3. Klout
Klout is recognized as the most influential metric for online influence. To determine if someone is in fact influential, find his or her network influence and Klout scores. A network influence score assesses the influence of one’s engaged audience—how much influence it has and to what degree the audience listens to and engages with the thought leader and his or her content. The more social engagement you can generate, the more your Klout score will improve. Klout scores range from 1 to 100.
4. Bottlenose
Bottlenose combines your Twitter and LinkedIn content sharing activity and uses them to scan trending topics and deliver custom-tailored content to you in real time. Bottlenose also offers solid social search capability.
5. Social Searcher
Social Searcher functions by taking your keywords, running a search and then finding the analytics associated with the results to give you the most relevant content curation options.
6. SocialEars
SocialEars uses contextual analytics in its search for content. The search results rank content by its real-time share factor and by the influence of content creators, so the content SocialEars delivers is likely to be credible and authoritative.
7. LikeHack
LifeHack saves time by aggregating, curating and delivering top stories on your relevant topics. The features include sharing data for Facebook, Twitter and industry blogs. LikeHack curates and highlights important content, delivers top stories through a mobile app and email, and hosts a personalized search engine for your content discovery.
Smart content curation can significantly increase your social following and magnify your social reach, which increases social lead generation and conversion. Without social content curation, you will miss out on valuable social media capital, and your website and company will face the consequences. Curating relevant, highly shareable content could help you become an industry thought leader and greatly increase your website traffic and new business generation.