Businesses and social media managers use content curation to save time on content creation. But ironically, oftentimes content curation too becomes a time-consuming process. If you’ve ever run manual searches on Google to find content you can share on social media, you know exactly just how hard it can be to maintain a continuous stream of content for your social media updates.
Here are few tips to help simplify the process of content curation, without having to spend hours on it every day:
1. Automate the Content Curation Process
Owing to the volume of conversations on social media, you will have to post several times a day on each of your social accounts for your audience to notice you and engage with the content you share. However, logging into each of your social accounts manually to share content as and when you find it will turn out to be erratic and ineffective. It will also disrupt the rest of your tasks for a work day causing severe loss of productivity.
Social media automation holds the solution to this problem. Content discovery tools like DrumUp and Feedly help automate the content curation process, giving you all the content you need in one place. Some tools even let you schedule posts to multiple accounts for days, weeks and even months in advance, saving you the hassle of having to share posts manually.
(Disclosure: I write for the DrumUp Blog)
2. Curate Content from Influencers
Influencers enjoy large followings on social media because they share high quality content. One of the ways to save time on curation is to follow such influencers and share their content. This will add to your stream of content and also help you start a conversation with them.
Tools like Followerwonk are useful in identifying influencers among your followers. You can also use the tool to search Twitter by keywords in Bios and profiles, and categorizing them by the number of followers they have, their location etc.
You can also use tools like Newsle to keep track of all the publications by and mentions of the influencers in your Facebook and LinkedIn networks.
3. Cut Back on the Number of Social Profiles
Sure, having a presence on an innumerable number of social media platforms will help you reach a much wider audience. But if you’re going to be stacking social media profiles for your business, also remember that you will have to produce and share more and more content to stay active on all those platforms. That means you’ll end up spending an increasing amount of time on content curation and social media management.
Rather than spreading yourself too thin across social networks, study your target audience to understand their social media preferences. Identify two or three platforms on which they’re most active and focus your efforts on building a strong presence on those select platforms.
4. Follow a Content Curation Schedule
While content recommendation engines will save you the effort of having to run manual searches for content, you will still have to invest some time in reviewing the suggested content to decide what you want to share. In fact, this is the most essential step in the content curation process, without which you’ll only be doing content aggregation.
When you’re reviewing the content suggestions made by a content discovery tool like DrumUp or Scoop.it, allocate a specific amount of time for the task. You can curate content as frequently as it suits your social media activity patterns. Process the content suggestions in batches, so the effort you invest each time will last you a few days or weeks.
5. Use Analytics to Curate the Right Kind of Content
Analytics is an important element of social media management. It’s also critical at the level of content curation because the insights you get from these tools help you identify the kind of posts that are receiving the highest engagement. In effect, it helps you understand the content preferences of your audience.
With this knowledge you will be able to tailor the content you share to match audience preferences, ensuring that you don’t waste any time on sharing content that wouldn’t work anyway. Consequently, you’ll also see an improvement in engagement levels across all your social accounts.
Social media management tools are indispensible since they let your business achieve greater levels of productivity and better results. When picking your arsenal, choose tools that complement each other in a way that reduces your effort. If you’ve already got a set of tools you prefer to use do share your suggestions, I’d love to give them a spin too!
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