Social media is an important tool for brands. It allows you to relate to your target audience on a personal level, sharing what matters to you and communicating value in a way that feels immediate and emotional. It’s also a critical part of your marketing strategy.
To preserve this atmosphere of personal communication, stick to the 5:3:2 rule:
- 5: Should be content from others that is relevant to your audience
- 3: Should be content from you that is relevant to your audience but not sales focused
- 2: Should be personal, fun content that helps humanise your brand
There’s no hard-and-fast rule for how often you should post for marketing purposes, but you do need to be consistent. That’s why it’s important to curate your content.
Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing, and re-sharing the best content about an issue of interest on social media channels. A company curating content for marketing usually considers third-party and branded content alike, adding commentary where appropriate and re-sharing at just the right time.
How to curate content for social media
Content curation isn’t a new marketing strategy, but savvy companies continue to adapt their approaches to it. The best way to start is to analyze who your readers are, what they need, and what inspires them to respond, allowing you to share great content.
Understand your target audience’s interests
Effective content curation for social media starts with understanding who you’re talking to. If you haven’t already segmented your social media audience, this is the time to start. Facebook Audience Insights is one of several helpful curation tools available that can tell you more about the people who see your posts — their ages, jobs, education levels, family statuses, and more.
The more marketing demographic information like this you have, the more effectively you can curate content for those audiences.
Analyze engagement
Social media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook have built-in marketing analytics tools that let you track the stats of your content. To find out who your content is reaching and whether people are interested, look at marketing metrics like:
- Reach: how many people see your content
- Impressions: how many times your content is displayed
- Engagement: how often your audience shares, likes, comments on, and clicks your content
- Engagement rate: the percentage of your audience that interacts with your content
- Conversion rate: percentage of people who respond to your CTA (i.e. click through a link, buy off of your page, complete your form etc)
This information can help you create and curate the most resonant blog posts, original content, and other great content at your disposal.
Content curation tips for social media
Curating content for marketing purposes is about more than re-posting. It’s about taking older content and making it relevant, and there are many ways you can make that happen.
Upcycling
Do you have a blog post or article that has some real substance, but it’s just a bit too thin or too old to be relevant to an audience in the current market? Upcycle it.
Upcycling content starts with the kind of evergreen content that has lasting value for your audience. Using that as your base, you add more valuable and engaging information to bring it up to date.
One option is to add data. Content today relies much more on statistics than content from five years ago. If anyone has released a study in the past year or two that reinforces or enhances your message, use that as the jumping-off point for your upcycled content.
Adding to word count also helps you upcycle great content, especially if you’re working from an older piece. A top-ranked Google post averages 1,140 to 1,285 words, but back in 2014, the average post length was just 808 words. As always, make sure that whatever you add creates value for your audience.
Batching
Batching lets you save time by planning and scheduling content for marketing ahead of time. To make it work, you have to have done your homework and know what resonates with your audience. Use that information to choose your topics and content types for the upcoming month.
Next, look at the content you have to work with on that topic. Determine what pre-existing content suits your theme. Content discovery tools like Pocket can help you find and save content like blogs, articles, and other social content to share. Content curation tools like Curation Suite can help you publish batches of content that fit your audience niche.
Once you’ve found all the engaging content you can, look at where else your needs are. That’s the content you’ll want to create originally.
Original content is still important in a marketing curation strategy. You may have plenty of pre-existing material at your disposal for social media posts, but your audience will notice if you don’t share content that’s new.
Framing
First impressions matter. Any time you re-share someone else’s content, promote user-generated content, or repurpose your own, think about how you can give it a new angle, make it apply to your niche, or present it in a way that gives it more impact.
There are several ways you can frame a curated article. One is by tweaking the title, highlighting the value you added to the article, or writing a lead-in that emphasizes your unique angle on the material. Take some of your commentary and use it to introduce the material on your social media channels of choice.
Other options include:
- Adding or updating images
- Creating infographics from existing or new data
- Adding an interactive element like a quiz or calculator
You also have the option to change the medium entirely. You could publish an edited transcript of a podcast, for example, or create a video out of your podcast audio. Either option gives you new ways to share content based on your original material.
Tracking the results of content curation
As with any content marketing strategy, hitting “publish” doesn’t mark the end of your curation journey. Content marketers need to keep collecting data on how posts do, who interacts with them, and whether they get the right results.
The best way to evaluate the results of content curation for social media is to follow what each person does after they see and (hopefully) interact with your post. Ideally, that includes call tracking, which captures data from your phone calls and can show you which marketing campaigns led to those calls.
Want to get the most out of your content curation for social media? Find out how call tracking can help you analyze marketing results and reach your audiences more effectively.