Many businesses put an incredible amount of time and money into their blogs. This is a great strategy (and one we use here at Business Blueprint!), but it is not right for everybody.
If you have a social media presence and you want to constantly be engaging your audience, content curation is a shortcut to sharing helpful and relevant information.
What Is Content Curation?
For starters, content curation is the ‘re-presentation’ of existing media. In other words, it is a collective display of research taken from other digital sources, usually about a singular topic.
A popular company that employs this method is Buzzfeed. When you read any of the stories they produce, you will immediately notice screenshots of tweets, movie posters, and random memes taken from elsewhere.
Even publications like the Sydney Morning Herald use content curation, pulling in tweets to highlight what people are saying about a certain subject.
This form of content curation is effective and can give you the opportunity to add a fresh take to an old topic, but it can still be quite a lot of work as you are still creating articles from scratch.
Busy entrepreneurs with budding businesses may also wish to use a simplified content curation strategy, whereby they simply share other people’s articles and blogs. Doing this online via LinkedIn or Facebook boost your online visibility and sets you up as someone who has their finger on the pulse.
By posting news and information which is relevant to whatever your business is about, you are growing your own influence over your audience.
How To Choose Articles To Share With Your Audience
One of the easiest ways to track your desired content is through the use of hashtags. Social media has made it a lot simpler for us to access stories we want to read and data we wish to absorb. Simply do a search for a relevant hashtag on Twitter or Facebook and see what comes up before sharing the best pieces with your audience.
Another viable option is Google Alerts, which sends you a daily email based on your selected keywords. Whether you want information about coconut water, gardening, or carpentry, Google Alerts will keep you in the loop on recent trends.
Buzzsumo is another popular tool. This helps you monitor your subject of choice to know which articles are the most read and shared on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You also have the option to enter websites of competing brands to see what’s being shared on their end.
The Secret To Successful Content Curation
For content curation to work for you, share only relevant and quality content which will be of interest to your audience.
Now, here’s my expert tip to trim your content creation time but also get your brand and message out there:
Sniply makes it possible for you to customise the links you share with your customers. With this tool, the link you share will open to an external website, however a custom call to action will pop up at the bottom of the page, inviting the reader to visit your site.
This is like giving a famous celebrity a shirt with your brand on it to wear! People are excited to see the celeb but they can’t help but notice the shirt, especially if it has a message which suits what they are looking for.
The result of your clever content curation and your use of Sniply is more leads, more customers… and more growth!
Want more tips on content marketing and growing your business? Book your free ticket to our mind-blowing one day business workshop at 52ways.com.
