Four ways to get the most out of content curation

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We all know that content is king in the social media game, but for those of us actually producing the content, we know how difficult and time consuming it can be to churn out a constant stream of original posts.

Content curation helps fill the gaps where you don’t have original content to post, and at Hodges, it’s a big part of our social media mix. When done right, content curation isn’t merely just a re-post of someone else’s content. Companies and brands who do it right add value by lending their perspective and commenting on what they’re sharing. You also add value by presenting thoughtfully hand-picked content that you know your followers are interested in seeing, but maybe don’t have the time to find themselves, or don’t know where to find at all.

Curating is one of the buckets of our social “content bins” as we like to call it, and as you can imagine, sorting through all that stuff takes tons of time—from actually finding the content, to reading through it, picking out the best, and then re-packaging it for your audience.

That said, here are some ways I’ve learned to streamline the process and help clients find the best content:

  1. Know your audience. The first step is to actually take a step back and think about your audience. Who is your audience and what are their interests? A good place to start is to look at the types of content you’ve already been publishing and seeing what kinds of posts received the most engagement. Was there a post that spurned lots of conversation and dialog in the comments section? Did you receive a lot of likes on a post where you shared some kind of tip or photo?
  2. Build your curation list. Once you’ve determined what kinds of posts your audience wants to see more of (perhaps they like tips and DIYs or maybe there’s a certain timely topic your audience wants to follow and learn more about), you’ll want to develop a list of places from which you can source more of that kind of content.
  3. Practice time management. Once you have your list, you’ll then need to determine how often and how much time you want to spend monitoring and mining those places for shareable items. It’s very easy to get sucked into the rabbit hole of links and streams of content, and you don’t want to spend hours and hours on blog surfing. I typically spend about an hour and a half a week per client mining for content. It helps if you have a client whose brand is aligned with your own personal interests. Some of the blogs I peruse on a personal basis are actually good sources of content for clients, so I’m killing two birds with one stone.
  4. Edit and Organize. Lastly, you’ll want to come up with a way to organize and save content that you’ll later use to build out your editorial calendar. I find that using a feed reader like Feedly or Flipboard is a great way to comb through a lot of content from different sources in one place. From there I’ll use the application’s bookmarking tool to save content for later. I also set up a separate email folder in my inbox to store items I come across outside of my reader. When it’s time to sit down and write out the editorial calendar, I’ll go to those two places to start building my posts.

Fellow content curators out there, what are some of your tips and best practices?

(Photo credit: gallery by Adam, on Flickr)

Paulyn Ocampo

Since joining THP in 2008, Paulyn has helped execute strategic plans for clients like AMF Bowling Centers, Allianz, Tridium, Silgan and The Peterson Companies. A Norfolk native, she earned her undergraduate degree in mass communications, with a concentration in public relations from VCU.

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