Content Curation is the emerging trend

pic courtesy- herbertkikoy

Whatever industry you are in today, you will be using social media marketing to get more and more business. One of the primary components of social media is 'content'.  You are going to use this overwhelming mass of information on the internet. We are going to look at different tools that you can use to review and filter content.

Two primary reasons why you want to curate content.

1. You as an industry expert continue to keep your finger on the pulses and stay informed, stay ahead of the curve for you own personal as well for your client’s benefit too.
2. You can really establish yourself as a thought leader in the social media platform related to your business, because you are sharing your cherry pick or hand-pick pieces of content.   
3. You are going to give attribution to the source of that content and that helps to build your relationship, and that’s what we say relationship marketing.

When sharing content through social platforms, you should have a balance of 50-50 percent of your own content and Other People Content (OPC).  So curation tools help you to cherry pick that OPC.

When you are curating your content, you know which piece of content to share. Then you want to give some thought keeping in mind that you are essentially endorsing that blog, website or source you get the content from.  So that actually is part to do with your reputation, you establish yourself as industry expert or thought leader. So it’s important to be mindful about what it is that you are sharing and strategically being a part of relationship marketing. So you draw attention of your subscribers, follower or fan to third-party blog/newsletter that you respect.

So the first tool that we are going to share for content curation is Google.

Google alerts - Its very important tool, very simple and easy and you can get alerts by email, once a day or as it happens. Which means the moment a piece of content is published you will get notification with the keyword pertaining to your business.  The best use of Google alert is for reputation management, and you are going to do what we say is Vanity Search.

Vanity Search- is about searching for your own name on Google. So those are finger on the pulse to know what people are saying about you and you can respond their accordingly.

Google reader is the next for content curation where you are going to subscribe to a dozen of blogs. You can sort those blogs into folders in Google reader, and the first thing you probably do next day is to scan through the list select these pieces of content and share out.

Facebook, This is a great place for newsfeeds and also making friend list.  Newsfeed is the homepage or the first page whenever you log on to. There you have a stream of information and that is where Facebook is deciding with their algorithm what they think you should see. So that is one way where you can glance through and find great pieces of content. But I recommend you set more control on that, what we say is friend list. One of the easiest and quickest ways to account-edit friends-create fan pages. So that makes a nice, streamlined, filtered view of the news feed with just the pages that you want your friends to view.

Twitter lists, One of my personal favorite, you can make up to 20-list with 500 members in each. So that is the list of people on twitter you feel is a good to source and curate content.  So on twitter you click on list or create a list and then add people to it. You can find other list that has been curated already at listorious.com or you can go to other people account like Mashable etc. And whatever mobile application you are using it makes it easy to refer on your mobile devise and stay informed and cherry pick content.

Hootsuite- It’s a fantastic app where you basically have all kind of columns and you can save search with different keywords.  With Hootsuite you can add all kind of social profiles such as your personal Facebook profile, different fan pages, and multiple twitter accounts. Then when you find content going by it you can cherry pick those content from your saved searches or list and paste it on the publisher and pre-schedule it. Not many applications allow you to do that, but that’s the beauty of Hootsuite. 

Paper.li - it is like you can have you own virtual newspaper and you pull content from YouTube, flickr different blogs, twitter or facebook.  Place them nicely and it looks virtual newspaper and out it goes on twitter saying ‘The Daily is out'. This way your followers can see that you have curated great content for them.

Alltop.com - The highest voted content is shown first, or you can follow people who curate great content. Pick them up and don’t forget to mention the source as part of relationship management.

So put your strategies together and get started.