You can publish a steady stream of social media content that will attract an audience without having to create it from scratch.
How?
Content curation. It’s also a helpful way to turn your social channels into thought leadership platforms where it’s not always your brand doing the talking. You’ll be known as a go-to resource for your industry as long as you don’t claim it as your own (that’s plagiarism).
And you don’t have to rely on a single source to find it. Here are five easy places to find valuable content for your social media channels:
- Curation tools
- Email newsletters
- Community forums and groups
- Questions to your network
1. Curation tools
By far, digital tools are the biggest time-saver curator. Loads of options, like Flipboard, Scoop.it, and Google Alerts exist. They’re mostly aggregation sites with RSS feeds. Here are three of them that help you find, save, and organize relevant content so you can select the best to share with your audiences.
Pocket is one of the most popular bookmarking apps. It’s useful to save content links in organized folders across devices. It’s integrated with over 1,500 apps, so your favorite is most likely covered.
Quuu
My employer’s tool Quuu was built for content curation for social media. Our AI-created Robin sends daily content to schedule and share on social platforms.
The curated content includes a mix of articles, videos, podcasts, reports, slideshows, and more from over 500 interest categories. It also can connect to social scheduling tools like Buffer, socialchief, HubSpot, and Hootsuite.
BuzzSumo
You can use BuzzSumo tools for finding and filtering content by the most popular or trending keywords in real time.
The tool searches billions of articles. It also lets you filter by content type and assess how well your competitors are covering a topic. A helpful Chrome extension lets you see the number of shares the content received. Select some of the relevant most-shared articles, then narrow the list to come up with the content to curate.
2. Twitter
Searching for social media content on social media sounds a bit obvious. You’ve probably done it. But we’re not talking about endless scrolling to weed through all the content from handles you follow and the accompanying ads.
You need to focus your search on Twitter on the most popular and relevant shared tweets. To do this, you should:
- Narrow your feed by creating Twitter Lists.
- Follow relevant hashtags and trending topics.
- Review the profiles and feeds of influencers and thought leaders in your industry.
Let’s explore these in detail:
Twitter Lists
A Twitter List is a group of curated accounts. You can create them based on topics, quality sources, etc. It streamlines all content from these sources into one feed that you can more easily monitor and pull content from.
You also can browse other people’s Twitter Lists if you need some inspiration or want to create new or expanded lists.
Caveat: When you add an account to your list, they are notified and can see the list’s name.
Hashtags and trending topics
Twitter is a sea of content waiting to be discovered. And hashtags are another way of streamlining tweets to find things worth retweeting or posting to other social media.
If you’re not familiar with hashtags your audience uses, look through the tweets on your Twitter Lists or go-to resources.
For example, professional writers use the tag #WritingCommunity. Check out this fun pie chart detailing the writing life of John St. Clair, including segments for worrying I’m not a good enough writer and procrastinating to actually writing:
How about you? 😬#WritingCommunity pic.twitter.com/HwKQ3jTeph
— John St. Clair (@uusaint) October 6, 2021
You also can use Twitter’s trending topics feature that appears in the “What’s Happening?” section on the right of your dashboard.
Influencers and thought leaders’ profiles
Influencers and thought leaders usually are experts in their niche. They often curate content they think their followers would be interested in.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, curated this tweet about Perseid meteor showers with a link to Space.com.
Each year around this time, Earth plows through the debris-trail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. At our orbital speed of 67,000 mph (30km/s) the particles burn harmlessly in our atmosphere, rendered aglow as shooting stars. Behold the annual Perseid Meteor shower:https://t.co/XGapXfe9BU
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) August 12, 2021
If your audience was similar to Neil’s, you could curate by retweeting or taking it to the next level by adding your own comment or insight.
3. Email newsletters
What’s better than a list of curated content straight into your inbox?
It feels like a bit of a cheat, but it’s not as long as you give proper credit when you share on social media. After all, you’ve taken the time to find newsletters with curated content worth sharing. Great examples of well-done curated newsletters include:
- Morning Brew
- NextDraft
- The Moz Top 10
Morning Brew
Slip out of bed, stick the kettle on, and enjoy a morning brew with Morning Brew. The daily email curates the top news stories in an easy and enjoyable format. It removes the jargon and condenses it into bite-sized, readable chunks. It’s also written conversationally.
NextDraft
NextDraft is another news-based newsletter. It covers the articles you didn’t see in the day’s news but should have. Creator David Pell doesn’t use any bots. He manually visits around 75 news sites a day and picks his top 10 most fascinating. Then adds his own commentary.
The Moz Top 10
If you’re looking for an industry-specific example, check out The Moz Top 10. Their twice-a-month newsletter covers 10 of what they deem the most valuable articles about SEO and online marketing. It’s a simple layout with a link to the article and a line or two about why you should read it.
4. Community forums and groups
A relative untapped area of content waiting to be curated are community sites and social media groups.
Drill down in Reddit and Quora to find subreddits or questions related to your topics. Look at what those community members post and share and you likely can find some great content to curate on your social channels.
Here’s an example of content from Quora curated by Sprout Social:
You also can join relevant Facebook or LinkedIn groups to see what they’re sharing that might appeal to your own social audiences.
5. Questions to your network
You know the old saying, “Don’t ask, don’t get.” My last tip is the most simple. Rather than searching for content to curate, let the content come to you.
Ask your audiences on social media to share their favorite content from the past week. Or ask your email subscribers to suggest content they think others would benefit from. They could share their own content, something they’ve seen, or both.
Be conversational in your request to better engage your followers as Seleena did here:
You’ll be surprised at the amount you can receive when you just ask.
Curate for something to share
While you can still manually search to curate underused content, having go-to resources for content to curate on social media makes the process easier than searching blindly.
Then, you can put your twist or comment on the curated content to create a semi-original curated post to fill your social media channels.
Do you rely on any of these sources for content curation? Are there any you think we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments.
All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you’d like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
