There’s a well-known “rule” in social media that for every piece of your own content you share, you should share four pieces from other sources.
This sounds like a simple proposal, but for busy social media marketers finding enough high quality content to curate can be challenging.
To add to the difficulty level of content curation, you’re likely to see better engagement when you vary the sources you curate from. You’ll be a more useful source of information for your followers, and you’ll give yourself more opportunities to forge valuable relationships with influencers.
To save you some time in combing through the wildly growing weeds of content on social media, we’ve put together a list of tactics you can use to find quality content quickly.
Why Varied Content Curation Helps
When people are checking out your social media profiles to decide if they want to follow you, one of the first things they’ll review is your share history.
If they see a lot of different authors, websites, and topics in your feed, potential followers will see you as a credible source of information. You appear more like an impartial museum curator who brings together great content from all over the web.
In varying your content curation sources, you are also increasing your reach in relationship building. When you post someone else’s content, they appreciate it, and might just be more likely to post yours.
And even if they don’t share your content you’ve got a good chance of an influencer spreading your posting of their content with their network. This is excellent publicity for your brand or site and can create lasting connections with big names in your industry.
1. Grab Trending Articles from Reddit
Reddit is thought to be the front page of the internet, and it can very often serve up newly trending articles that are relevant to your audience. It’s completely free and easy to sign up.
Once you create an account, you can search for the topics you’d like to subscribe to. Your subscriptions are called “subreddits”; you can edit these on the top left.
Anything you’ve subscribed to will show up in your news feed on the main page of your account. If you’d like to drill into a specific subscription topic instead of seeing the conglomerated feed, click on the subreddit you’d like to see on the top left.
Reddit is not a guarantee to find awesome content everyday, but you will periodically get lucky by subscribing to the most relevant subreddits.
2. Prepare a Spreadsheet of Industry Influencers
It’s easy to follow thought leaders or those who are influential in your industry on twitter. It’s not easy to keep track of those who consistently produce content that offers valuable information (there’s a lot of fluff out there).
To simplify things for yourself, create a spreadsheet that contains only those people who are worthy of your share. This way, you can quickly and easily rotate the types of content you tweet so you’re not always sharing from same person.
After all, you don’t want to be considered a mouthpiece for someone else. You want to be considered a thought leader and resource for information.
If your followers see you consistently sharing content from a single influencer, no matter how great that content is, they might disregard you and go straight to the source.
3. Share Articles In a Google Spreadsheet
You won’t be the only one reading industry articles on your team. Make sure that your teammates have an easily accessible place to share articles with you that they come across.
Google docs can come in handy for this.
It may be helpful to establish categories on the spreadsheet so you know which types of articles they are so that you can easily vary your posting subject matter and keep your feed engaging.
This tactic will save you a lot of time with having to search for every piece of curated content yourself.
4. Subscribe to Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a great tool to use for curation. It allows you to set up new content email notifications based on keywords of your choosing.
To add a new notification, just search for your keyword, select the little blue “show options” link below the search bar, and select your preferences. You will then effortlessly receive notifications when new content is published related to your keywords of choice.
You won’t want to rely on this method all of the time since it could cause some redundant posts amongst you and those who are subscribed to the same keywords. As long as you use this occasionally, you’ll be fine.
Just be sure to add your own commentary about the article in your tweet to add a personal touch for your followers.
5. Twitter Search Trick
In our recent article, we went over a snazzy search trick on twitter that allows you to search for articles on a particular topic within a specific date range.
For example, to search for posts using the hashtag #contentmarketing between the dates of November 2, 2014 and November 3, 2014, use the following format:
#contentmarketing since:2014-11-02 until:2014-11-03
You’ll be posting content that hasn’t been talked about for a while, which will give it more of a chance of getting shared.
For more information on this trick, check out our article “One Simple Twitter Trick That Will Save You Hours On Twitter”.
6. Make Use of Content Curation Sites
Paper.li and Content Gems are perfect curation site options. You can create accounts for free, enter in the keywords you are interested in, and have digests of these topics created for you.
They are both great for perusing various sources of content on a particular topic quickly. (They both have paid versions as well, but they provide the basic features for free).
7. Join LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups can be great resources for content. On the homepage, you can search for groups in the LinkedIn search bar at the top and subscribe.
Then, if you head to your groups dashboard (click on interests at the top>groups), you’ll see a digest of the most recent postings from your groups.
This type of curation comes with built-in engagement numbers because you can see what group members have already engaged with via comments/likes/etc.
Vary Your Sources of Content Curation
There’s not one magic method for content curation that produces golden content every time you look for it. This is why you’ll want to have a few different tactics for curation so you can find the content you are looking for quickly and easily.
Varying your sources will also help make your feed more interesting and demonstrate to your followers that you are plugged into the top resources out there (Which makes you a top resource as well).
What are your favorite content curation sources? Share them with the group in the comments!