Simple content curation to expand influence and boost visibility

Simple content curation and creation can both play a vital part in presenting yourself and your company online.

Original content creation is your opportunity to present company values, services and capabilities in your own words. Adding content curation to the mix allows you to cultivate leads by demonstrating thought leadership and knowledge – of your market and of your audience.

Getting started with simple content curation means incorporating the approach into your overall marketing strategy. Look at how curating content will support your goals, and use curated content to develop your company and brand story.

You can work the two approaches together really well to boost your online visibility and expand your influence. Do make sure before you start to acknowledge and credit the original source and do not in any way try to pass off others’ content as your own.

Getting started with simple content curation

When establishing a content marketing strategy, especially as a smaller company, it can be a challenge to ensure you have enough relevant. helpful content for your audience. You can supplement your original content by finding and sharing related relevant content that your audience will find valuable, helping you stay more visible.

By sharing other people’s content you are demonstrating three things:

1. A wider knowledge and understanding of the current situation in your industry. You can comment and share insights that are particularly targeted to your readers.
2. You understand what will be of the most value to your audience, and can share that value without having to create every piece and without a focus on pushing your own products and services.
3. Sharing other people’s content is a great way to drive interaction. You can focus on the social part of social media and use shared content as a conversation prompt and as a way to develop relationships.

Having the discipline to successfully curate content will benefit you as well as your audience:

1. Keeping you up to date with the latest news in your industry and offering a deeper range of content.
2. Giving you the best ideas about which content resonates with your audience, helping direct your content creation efforts.
3. Letting you display some personality and opinions as you offer up a wider choice of content.

Everyone is creating content; your reader is likely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content out there and doesn't know where to go to find the best bits - this where your expertly curated feed will guide them. Click To Tweet

A simple content curation process

Looking for the best content as a service to your audience can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, time-consuming and overwhelming. To do this well you need an established process and a system, along with a  good organised approach.

You need to find the content to share, add your commentary to the content you are sharing, then schedule your shares to reach your audience at the right time.

Find your content

There are multiple tools on the market that can help you, from free to eye-wateringly expensive, so what you use will depend on personal choice and budget. Lining up the tools you use is the first step to setting up a usable process.

Assign a certain amount of time to content curation so that it doesn’t become another unmanageable task; with only 15-30 minutes a day you could efficiently and effectively share key industry content and increase your visibility.

Identify your core content sources

What key influencers in your industry do you follow? Do you regularly read general or industry news sites to keep up to speed? Set up Google alerts, use Twitter lists, systematise your reading and always be alert to content that you can use to share with your target audience.

Feedly will allow you to plug all your usual sources in, and in return will offer you a user-friendly view of all the content you want to keep tabs on. Flipboard is another visual way to view and collect the most relevant content.

You will want to collect these pieces and add some order to them; a great way to do this is to use Pocket, a tool that lets you save content either from your desktop browser via a chrome extension, or via an app on your phone. As you see relevant content online, save it to your pocket and see your collection of relevant, valuable content build.

Add your commentary and share your content

An important piece of the process is to add your value, your personality and your opinion to the pieces you share, so that your audience sees that you are expertly curating content that is relevant, helpful and valuable to them.

The higher the value of the content you share, and the more targeted it is to your audience's needs, the more that value rubs off on you and raises your perceived worth to your target audience Click To Tweet

Using your pocket dashboard, you can now either share directly and immediately to your chosen social networks, or you can do what I do and use Buffer to schedule the updates.

This allows you to spread your shared content on a preset schedule, meaning that you can appear to be present on social media for longer periods than you physically are. All without having to dedicate hours to sharing content in real time.

Being organised, sharing content in batches, then getting on with the work of running your business, allows you to maintain a good level of presence on social media without impacting too much on your time.

Respond and react

While you may be scheduling ahead and sharing content to a pre-decided schedule, you will want to monitor what you are sharing and use the rest of your time for the social bit of social media – that is responding to comments on your shares, using shared content as a conversation starter, and making the most of the content you are sharing to prompt further discussions.

This is the fun part and the reason you and your readers use social media – to make it relevant to them and useful to their business, allowing them to extend their industry knowledge and awareness courtesy of the value that you are adding.

By following this process-driven approach to simple content curation, you will start to see your engagement levels on social media rise, you are using your subject-matter knowledge to better effect, and you will enjoy the increased visibility you get.

Do you share other people’s content on social media? I would love to know what tools you use to curate content and if this approach is something that works for you. If you need help in this area, there are lots of ways we can provide that help – get in touch with us today at info@marketingondemand.co.uk and let’s explore what services we can offer you.