Is Content Curation on Social Media Worth It to Make More Sales
You may have heard the term content curation is an important aspect of being on top of social media but not quite sure what it is or how to do it. It is not as difficult as you might think, it just takes some thought and creativity.
What Is Content Curation in Social Media?
Content curation in social media means you do not have to write or produce all the content that you publish on your various platforms you are a part of.
Curating content is looking at the content that your target audience might deem important or useful, and reworking it in to help your business as well as your audience and prospective clients.
To curate content that your audience might enjoy, begin by searching through your email newsletters, social media, following relevant hashtags or other keywords, and signing up for Google Alerts for terms relating to your audience.
Then create an “evergreen” file of that content for future use — you can use a swipe file or your social media management system to keep track of content and ideas you might be able to use at some point. You may also add it to your social media and content calendar when you feel the time is right and/or you need content.
Why Curate Content for Social Media?
One important benefit of sharing curated content, in place of just content you create, is that curated content can aid in keeping up with the demands of social media algorithms and the frequency of content needed. For example, the half-life of any tweet is less than 20 minutes which in the grand scheme of things is short, right? If your strategy is to stay current in your audience’s Twitter feed or another feed, and your content is history in 18 minutes, then you need a lot of content to share so you appear to be present in your audience’s feed.
Unless you a word master it is difficult to create a ton of content per day without using content curation, such as retweeting content or republishing a link, a photo, a video— or another important and timely piece of content that you unearthed.
Keys to Successful Content Curation?
The content you curate needs to be useful and important to your audiences. While it is enjoyable to curate dog memes, your audience may be cat owners, and dog means will not attract their attention — thus, that type of content is irrelevant. Because they do not find it relevant to their needs, they will bypass your feed, and your content, and in the end the algorithms will adjust accordingly.
The content that you curate must be just as exciting and informative as any content that you would publish that you might create on your own. Also, you do not want to just link to someone else’s content. You need to add context around why you are sharing it with your audience.
For example, if you are writing content for an email newsletter, go ahead and create an introduction graph discussing why you included the link or why someone might want to lick on it. Ditto for social media; if you are curating and sharing, discuss why it is relevant and why it was important enough for you to share with your audience. Use a limited number of characters or the caption space to explain this. This gives you a chance to put your own signature on the content — whether you agree or disagree with the original.
Content curation is key if you are utilizing social media platforms for social selling or trying to capture an audience for business or even pleasure.
