Curate Content Like a Pro

Posted by Tom Leto in Uncategorized

Content Curation is all about establishing yourself as a resource for your prospects.

To curate or to create, that is the question.

The answer is both.

Creating original content is valuable, but it takes quite a bit of time. As a busy professional, you may not always have time to put together an awesome, original post.

When you curate content, you provide the service of gathering resources from multiple expert sources into one location. This makes you and your social media sites an invaluable resource for your target audience. Curating is fast, and sharing a variety of information with your audience delivers a completely different (but still valuable) content experience to them.

When You Should You Curate Content Instead of Creating It

There are several reasons why someone would curate content rather than create their own. I am not going to list ALL of them, but there are three main reasons people choose to curate content instead of creating from scratch.

1. You aren’t the best at or don’t enjoy creating content on a regular basis.
2. You want to save time.
3. To switch things up and add variety. If you’re doing nothing but promoting your own content, your audience can get bored. Sharing other people’s awesome content is not only interesting for your audience – it’s a great way to get mentions and build relationships with other content creators.

How to Curate Content Your Audience Will Love

Before you start curating, ask yourself these two questions:

Question 1: Who is your target audience?

This is answered by completed your Prospect Profile worksheet. This sheet helps you define who you are trying to connect with, and what they might be interested in reading about.

Question 2: What subjects and topics are your readers most interested in?

Figure out which topics they like to read about, what gets them excited, and what they actually care about. For example, if your audience is full of CMOs and VPs/Directors of Marketing, you might search for a collection of great content relating to topics like brand strategy, digital marketing, mobile marketing, company culture, and other things those kind of readers care about.

The most important thing to remember when curating your content is to gather content that will be USEFUL to your prospects.

Tools to Make Curation Easy

Here are several easy and effective tools you can put to good use when curating and publishing your curated content:

• Feedly – I really like Feedly because it’s an RSS site (just a fancy way of saying the site pulls articles from all sorts of publications). It allows you to set up a bunch of different feeds to pull targeted content from tons of different sources.
• Influencer Sites – If you’re already familiar with the big, influencer sites in your market, you may already know which ones consistently crank out great content. So you may be sitting on a curation goldmine in your own inbox. Subscribe to their lists or visit their social media profiles on a regular basis to use their content in your curation projects.
• Social Media – Social media is a great resource for content to share. You can see what topics are trending and join industry related groups. You can even make a point to curate content from specific people who you’d like build a relationship with.

4 Steps to Curating Content Like a Pro

Step 1

Put together the most detailed target audience profile you can. Hopefully you’ve already done this, but if not, here is a post we wrote that walks you through the process.

Step 2

Do some research to find out what topics your ideal prospects actually care about. Find the places online where your prospects are hanging out (i.e. Linkedin or Facebook groups) and check out the popular discussions.

Ask your current audience and clients what’s on their minds and what they’d like to read about.

Identify the top blogs in your industry. These could be news outlets, popular blogs, or the personal sites of thought leaders.

Step 3

Become a ninja with Feedly, because it will simplify your curation process. Use those top industry blogs you researched in Step 2 to create a feed. It’s really simple. Just click that Add Content button on the left side and enter the name or link of the blog.

Organize your feeds in any way you like. Do this well, and you’ll have a one stop shop for all the content you could possible curate. Every time a new post is published on a site you’ve added to the feed, Feedly will pull it into your stream. You can save, share, schedule on Hootsuite, and much more, all within Feedly.

Bonus – Step 4

Use a content scheduler to schedule out your social media posts all at once. Hootsuite and Buffer are two popular ones, but there are more – and a quick visit to google searching for “content scheduler” and similar search terms will turn up more. We use both for different purposes within the company.

Below are screenshots of a week in Hootsuite and next, a week in Buffer.

The important concept here is to decide how frequently to post on each social site, and what the best times of the day to post are. There are lots of blogs out there claiming to have the best recipe, but it can vary based on industry, target audience, and which social site you’re on.

There are a few important points that most agree on though. Post consistently, whether it is once every day, twice every day, or on ever Tuesday and Thursday. Be consistent and make sure to curate quality content. Use your content scheduler to schedule your social media posts all at once, saving yourself tons of time.

What are your favorite tools for content curation? Share them with us in the comments!

With steps, and with a little practice, you’ll be curating great content for your audience and customers in no time. Plus, you’ll have another way to keep your content calendar full with interesting and useful content.