Learning how to curate content is an essential task for social media managers. And time is short!Content is an essential part of your social media marketing plan. As a social media marketer, you need to both create original content and curate content from other sources. Time spent reading niche-related blog articles is important to keep up with industry news. Being a part of the conversation by sharing content with thoughtful comments and questions will help your brand be a sought-after source of knowledge as well. Still, feeding the content monster can take over if you let it. To help your content curation become less of a chore, let’s look at nine tactics you can use to maintain control and keep fresh. 1. Find Your Brand
Knowing what to share is the first step in making sure your content is on point. The key aspects of your brand’s content creation should naturally extend to other content that you share to build your content platform.
Your curated content and your originally created content should have the same tone, big ideas and overall fit. Your content platform’s output of original posts, curated content, graphics, Tweets and comments all flow together into what the public sees and judges you on. Yes, it’s important!
2. Stay on Target
I like to call this target the “brand seeds.” Find the three seeds that make up the heart of your social content, and stick to them. For example, if I were working with Sprout Social, my three seeds might be social media, social media management and social customer service.
I would find content that fit these three seeds and add in other content that was related and would be of interest to my followers. Sticking to a narrow focus helps build your area of expertise and knowledge base.
3. Be Organized
Creating systems for your social media consumption is important. If you don’t have something in place for reading content and finding great content, you’ll waste a lot of time. I like to use Feedly to create folders for the different types of content I create. For each folder, I add RSS feeds to fill the needs of different accounts and sometimes clients.
Sources to Find Content
Feedly: Add RSS feeds into folders for different accounts or topics.
Alltop: Create a MyAlltop page to see the blogs that I pull in to review when I curate from this platform. These are some of my go-to sources.
Pinterest: This never lets me down for great content when I search.
BuzzSumo: You can customize alerts in BuzzSumo by keyword, link, author and domain. I get an email for these each morning and check through on the website occasionally.
Planoly:You can find great user generated content by hashtags or keywords. This is perfect for brands or if you’re using a branded hashtag for social media campaigns.
A rookie mistake is sharing all your content at once in a huge bunch and then going long stretches without anything else. Don’t do this. Instead, create a steady stream of content that people won’t be overwhelmed with when they are live on social media.
There are many ways to share your content within Sprout on a schedule that you create:
Set up your Queueto meet your needs. Mine is set to publish four times a day so that I don’t have to think about an exact schedule. This makes it easy to add posts with one click to the Queue.
Use the Compose box to precisely schedule posts at a certain time.
Use the Chrome extension to add to your Queue or schedule at a certain time.
Important social media metricswill be based on your overall social media marketing strategy. This is a bigger conversation that you should have worked into your plan, but the basics are:
Growth in follower count
Number of +1s, Likes or shares
Customer engagement with content
If you notice these things taking a dive, it’s time to rethink your content strategy.
6. Cut What Isn’t Working
Sometimes you hit a sweet spot with your content, and everyone loves it! Then the algorithms change. Again.
If your former best type of content is falling flat, it’s time to remove it from the repertoire. Use your metrics to see what’s working, and do more of that. This is common-sense advice that people fail to implement every day.
7. Ask What People Want
In one of my most difficult-to-manage social media communities (read: low-tech industry with many lurkers), I asked what type of content they liked best and wanted to see on the Facebook Page. It was great to get feedback that reinforced what I was already doing and gave me some ideas for future content.
Now I feel more confident that I’m sharing the content they love, and my Page is doing better than ever. I think many communities want to dictate what they want to share, when the goal should be to give people what they want.
8. Keep Your Sources Fresh
I keep my RSS feeds in Sprout and Feedly full of great blogs to read, but if I find myself skipping over blog articles in my feeds, I reassess whether I want to have them in my daily content to skim and read. Cutting them out here means more efficient curating later.
9. Maximize Your Content
Be there when you share your content. You are the X factor in your social media content curation. Managing the brand online with comments, questions and conversation is what ultimately draws people to your content over and over again. The best-laid social media strategy in the world will fail without people to manage the social media listening and interaction.
I hope these pro tips give you some ideas to tweak your content strategy and create a compelling plan for your future social media marketing efforts.
Social Media Branding: Why You Site Needs to Match Your Social Profile
Have you given any thought to how your website matches your social media profile? Do you think this is important to your branding? Many experts think so. Branding is a complicated process. When you are working on promoting your brand to the world, you need to look at every aspect of your online presence including your website, blog, YouTube channel, and social media platforms.
Why Your Site Should Match Your Social Media
Coschedule.com contributor, Julie Neidlinger states on a recent post that she realized her brand was not consistent across the board online. Her social media presence was dissimilar to her website branding and other aspects that she had put up online.
When you do one thing on your site and something else on your social media and other locations, it can be confusing to your customers of your brand presence.
The Need for Consistency
A human psyche is an interesting place. One thing that is inherent in the way people think is their need for consistency. There is even a psychological reason for this fact. Cognitive consistency theory in psychology focuses on the fact that the human mind wants to have some degree of consistency in everything they do in life.
Some people interpret this as a degree of “sameness” or familiarity. However you look at it, it is important to note that there can be some variation in the consistency. But you should strive to keep the essential elements similar if you were going to establish this feeling for your brand.
What Inconsistency Does
The theory of cognitive consistency highlights some of the results of inconsistency. Three of the tenets of inconsistency include:
People expect consistency.
Inconsistency creates cognitive dissonance.
Dissonance restores us to consistency.
What all of this means is that, when a customer sees your branding elements such as your logo and website on your main page and then clicks on your social media or YouTube channel, they expect to see some similarity between the aspects. To see visual examples of how this is done, check out these custom social profile images.
If they do not find this consistency, it will create a state of cognitive dissonance or confusion about what they know of your brand in the other location. The brain begins to sort through the information to make sense of the information that doesn’t jive with the other information.
The feeling of dissonance between the two conflicting bits of information creates a motivation to return to a state of consistency. So the mind will try to fill in the gaps to compensate for the conflicting different data.
Then a conclusion will be drawn based on the best guess on what the truth is.
You don’t want to create this sort of conundrum with your customers and risk maybe even losing some of them in the process. That’s why it’s important to be consistent with your branding across all of your platforms and web properties.
How to Create Brand Consistency
There are some ways that you can create brand consistency for your brand. Here are a few things you can try to create consistency for your company online.
Use uniform colors.– When you use similar colors between your website, blog, and social media, it will be more obvious that it is your brand. Using the same or similar colors will enforce the idea that it is your brand across various platforms.
Create uniform images.– By creating similar or uniform images among your different online assets, you will help people understand that it is your brand and create better branding. Don’t feel you have to make the images exactly alike. However, you can create variations or different sizes, depending on the platform. You can also place them in varied locations to make it more creative. But feature the same image in different ways so that people start to identify your brand more readily, no matter what platform they find you on.
Use your logo wisely.– Clever use of your logo across your social media platforms and website will help create the brand consistency you need to promote your brand. Your logo is an important part of your branding so make sure you have it prominently displayed on your site.
Don’t send mixed messages.– When you put one thing on one site and another on your social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, you will confuse your customers. They may also have trouble knowing what your brand stands for. Keep it simple and focus on the most important aspects of your brand to create brand consistency.
Keep your icon the same
Another tip that you can use to create your brand consistency across your different social platforms is to keep the same icon. This is the small usually round-shaped picture that you upload of yourself or your logo. When it is the same, people come to recognize it across many different locations and start to associate your brand with various graphics in a logical form.
You should also make sure that you have the same images and icons within all of your social media platforms, not just Facebook and Twitter. Your Instagram account, Pinterest, Snapchat, and any of the other social media channels should all show off your customized images or logo that people have come to know about your brand.
Know your 3-5 words
Recently in an online with Daymond John that he holds for entrepreneurs, he mentioned the importance of your 3-5 words. By this, he was referring to the summary of what your business is about. This is a good test to see if you can summarize your brand in just a few words.
Daymond John states that you are not ready to promote your brand if you are unable to summarize it in 3-5 words. This is a challenge for some people whose branding may include a variety of products or services. It’s okay to have a variety of products or services, but you should still be able to pin down your brand in a few words.
So when thinking about your online branding, consider using these 3-5 words as a slogan or incorporating them some way within your branding efforts. It will start to catch on with customers and should prove to be something beneficial in the long run.
Start with your website
Despite how you approach your branding efforts, always start with your website. No matter how many social media platforms you place your branding with, you need first to make sure your website is in good order.
Web Design Team focuses on creating custom-designed websites that you can build a brand from that will help you establish your name with your target audience.
We start with finding out about your business and learning what your brand stands for. Then we create a unique website that reflects the values of your company that you can expound on.
Once you get your website up and running, you can take the finer aspects of your site and emulate that effect on your social media platforms. You need to keep a level of brand consistency across all platforms so that your customers will have no doubt they are in the right place.
Have you adopted this method and created a strong brand image? How important do you think it is to keep consistency across the different platforms? Leave a comment below.
