How to Get the Most Out of Your Content Budget: Tips for Curating Social Content
@freegraphictoday
As a business owner, you know that creating content is key to engaging potential customers and driving traffic to your website. But creating original content for your website and social channels can also be expensive and time-consuming. You may not always have time to update your site or write a new blog post every day, or even every week for that matter, but you probably still want to maintain a daily presence on all your social channels. So what's the best way to get the most out of your content budget? By curating content from other sources. Let's take a closer look at what content curation is, and how it can help your business below.
What is content curation?
At its most basic level, content curation is the process of finding and selecting the best content on a given topic, and organizing it in a way that is easy for your audience to digest.
To curate content, you'd search for valuable content from trusted sources, carefully sift through that content to select only what is most relevant and helpful to your audience, and then share it with them.
Sound too easy to be effective?
Think again. Because we live in the information age, where a simple Google search can return millions upon millions of results—curation is becoming increasingly valuable. By curating the best sources on a topic you know well, you're saving your audience time, frustration, and information overload. Think of it as a sort of bullshit filter for your audience. Because you're an expert, your followers won't have to wonder whether or not they can trust what they're reading because you've done the hard part of filtering out the noise.
But there's more to it than that. When you're curating content, you're also telling a story. You're sharing what is important to you, and your audience, painting them a picture of what you think are the most interesting or important topics or conversations of the moment.
The benefits of content curation
There are a number of benefits to content curation, including:
Saving time and money: By aggregating content from other sources, you can save time and money spent creating original content to share on your social channels.
Engaging your audience: Curated content is a great way to engage your audience and get them interested in your brand or topic. You'll also be able to maintain your social presence much more easily than if you were creating everything from scratch.
Improving your reach: with the help of curated content, you can increase your social media presence as effortlessly as possible.
How to get started with content curation
If you're ready to get started with content curation, here are a few tips to help you take the leap.
Focus on a topic or industry that you're interested in. This will make it easier to find relevant content to share, and streamline your feed so people can easily tell what you're all about.
Use tools like Feedly or Google Alerts to track new content on your topic of interest and cut down on the time spent looking for content. Let it come to you.
Share on your social media platforms linking back to the original article and adding a few comments of your own. Try to offer up some insight so that your post adds value to your readers.
The best tools for content curation
As touched on above, there are a tools you can use to help save time on your content curation efforts. Here are a few of our favourites:
Feedly: A great tool for tracking RSS feeds of blogs and news sources that you're interested in.
Google Alerts: A free tool that sends you an email notification when new content is published on a specific
RSS feeds: if there are specific websites you follow you can set up an RSS feed for those sites or subscribe to their blog so that you’re notified whenever they post something new.
How to use curated content in your marketing
Once you have a collection of curated content, there are a number of ways you can use it to help your business. Here are a few ideas:
Share excerpts from the articles on your social media channels.
Write blog posts or articles that include curated content as part of the overall argument.
Use curated images in your marketing. Interesting photographs or graphs can give you inspiration for new blog posts where you discuss what you see or find a new angle on it.
Curating content to share on social media can help you get the most out of your content marketing budget. It can also help you save time and money on original content, while still helping you present yourself as a smart, savvy, incredibly good-looking, and totally in-the-know expert in your field. So, why not give it a try? That's some tonic that goes down smooth.