How Small Businesses Can Use Content Curation To Keep Up Their Social Media Presence

Content curation is one of the best ways for businesses to keep their audience constantly engaged on social with minimum effort.

By sharing content from relevant and popular sources, small businesses can gain the trust of their audience with ease and build credibility. Curated content is also a great conversation starter.

But when curating content you have to understand and work with your audiences' interests in mind. Remember that you're curating content FOR them, if it doesn't click then you're strategy is going to fail.

Types Of Content

Content Curation is an art form – you have to know what to post and when, in order to get the most attention. If done sloppily, curation is ineffective and loses its benefits. The kind of content you share is also important – content that has a personal touch tends to do well. Here are a few different types of content:

• Content for the Audience – This is content created by you to help out your audience. It has a personal touch and is usually in first person.
• Emotional content – Content that inspires emotion among readers. There are 4 main types – Humorous, Inspirational, Entertaining and Intellectual.
• Stories – Told in story form, users are more likely to respond to this kind of content.
• Open-ended content – Includes surveys, Q&As, Twitter chats etc. Where users participate actively in the creation of content.
• Real-time content – Leveraging latest news/ events to connect with readers.
• Informational content – This kind of content is useful for the reader. Usually involves guides, trends, myths, vlogs or even, podcasts.
• Visual content – Visual content like images, videos, infographics etc are more effective when capturing users' attention.

What The Experts Have To Say

Here's some advice from the experts on content curation:

“Simply hitting the share button isn’t going to help you build an established brand in your space. Rewrite any default text provided by the share buttons to share in your own brand voice.”- Ross Hudgens, writes for CMI.

This is a critical point. As Ross highlights, clicking on a share button isn't content curation. You have to add your own voice to it. Don't be a robot, add a quirky healine or a reaction to the post you're sharing. You can also quote an interesting line from the article or respond to a point made in it. Adding a personal touch to what you share is important.

“Sharing content multiple times is a controversial issue but for a tool like twitter it doesn’t make sense to only share a great piece of content you wrote only once. ” - Ian Cleary writes on his blog.

Posting multiple times a day is crucial. Everyone who uses Twitter knows how quickly tweets pour in, to counteract this, Ian shares a very useful tip. This doesn't apply solely to Twitter either, social media in general moves at lightning speed and posting only once a day will get you nowhere.

“Consistent content creation and optimizing can lead to an explosion in brand awareness. The holy grail of content marketing.” - Jeff Bullas, author of Blogging the Smart Way, commented in an interview.

As Bullas explains, content curation is the key to brand awareness but without consistency, it is useless. You won't garner attention by posting randomly, consistency is essential for success and planning is essential for consistency. Consistently posting on your social media accounts keeps you in your audience's feeds and consequently, in their minds.

Tools

Tools can make content curation an effortless task. They can reduced mundane daily tasks into simple, automated ones to save you a ton of time. Content marketers everywhere have adopted a bunch of tools and here are some must have tools that can help you out greatly:

• IFTTT

IFTTT stands for If This Then That, the tool gives you the power to make multiple apps work together. For example, you can make Facebook automatically post your Tweets as status updates or post blogs directly from feeds to your social media. The possibilities with this tool are endless. The app works through “recipes” or simple statements that dictate a response to a previous action. To help you get started, the app offers multiple recipes that are pre-determined. It integrates with a large number of apps and can be a life-saver for marketers everywhere.

• DrumUp

DrumUp is essentially a content curation tool combined with a social media management tool. With it's clean,minimalistic interface, the app is easy to use and gets you the best content from your niche on a daily basis. This content can then be scheduled on multiple social media accounts in a matter of minutes. To make sharing easier, there is a 'One-Click Schedule' feature that adds posts to your queue automatically. Customizing posts and scheduling times is also effortless. You can reschedule posts days, weeks or even months ahead. DrumUp is the one of the best tools for maintaining a consistent social media presence through quality content.

• Flipboard

Flipboard is a content discovery tool that shows you the latest happenings in your niche. You can save the content into different boards to suit your needs. Flipboard lets you share content in a unique way – you can share content in the form of digital magazines that contain a multitude of posts. Instead of curating one piece at a time, you can create a magazine with multiple pieces thus giving more information.

Content curation is a relatively easy process, but adequate research is a must. Blindly curating the most popular content from your niche won't boost leads. A successful content marketing strategy is built by constant research and testing – it is the same for curation.