Social media tools and platforms to help you manage, curate and post are developed at such a furious pace that it is almost impossible to keep up and test each one, all the while operating your business. Implementing a few of the platforms are sure to save you some time and a few headaches. As a business with an online presence, managing your social media is a full time job, not a hobby. It does require goals, strategy, tools, time, and manpower or womanpower. Just creating a few social profiles and a blog page are not enough. You should be actively engaging consistently and frequently to build your following, credibility, community and reputation.
It is important to humanize your brand and personally engage versus 100% automation. THAT isn’t social at all. You are not a robot and neither is your audience. Social media is relationship marketing to reinforce and support your brand image and establish long term connections.
In order to make your time most useful, investigate which tools work best for your needs, as well as which ones you will actually commit to using on a daily basis. They do help to simplify the process and minimize some of your valuable time online.
“Marketers are under pressure to find more cost and time effective ways to meet the increased demand for content marketing. The way to meet this need effectively is to add content curation into the content marketing mix.” Heidi Cohen, Content Curation In the Content Marketing Mix
Content Curation: Find, organize and share relevant, enriching content for your audience. Your curated content should focus on educating your readers and helping them to solve their greatest business issues.
Finding educational and newsworthy content takes time and effort. It isn’t just a matter of a quick search and click of a share button. There is such a surplus of data and intelligence flying through the airwaves that you should be particular about what you share.
“Content curation should be part of every content marketing strategy. There is no need to create all the content ourselves.” Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute
Follow your industry favorites, add their RSS feeds to your aggregator of choice, sign up their newsletters, listen to their podcasts and monitor their social networks. This will help you to filter the noise and receive only the content you want.
You can take a step beyond your standard social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn and try some of these other aggregators to reach further into the quagmire of content on the web. People consume hundreds of thousands of bits and bytes of data all day so filter your sources, provide something to tempt their palate and become a trusted, sought after resource. Many of the available curation tools are FREE!! Simply sign in with your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account and you are good to go.
Using some of the tools below, you can curate content based upon your interests, industry, keywords, hashtags and even user names in a few of the platforms. Some of them can be utilized for social search, analytics and real-time trending topics as well as having a multipurpose of posting and scheduling. THAT is a bonus as it saves a few steps in sharing your trusted content.
Word to the wise: Just because you see something populated, doesn’t necessarily mean it is enriching and valuable for your followers. Make sure you click on each post and read it too, putting your trusted name behind your content.
Be selective and have a laser focus. Don’t simply share “just because.” Each piece of content you post, share and annotate is a representation of you and your online brand image; become the go-to source in your industry. A thought leader.
“I think curation is usually something people lean on when they are looking for something they can put together quickly. But if you’re doing curation right, you actually have to put a lot of time into researching things so you can serve the best content possible. Do not underestimate the amount of time it takes to curate content properly.” Corey Eridon, Hubspot
Image Credit: OneIMS
0 Comments