Content Curation

How Content Curation Keeps You Visible and Valuable to Your Network

March 30, 2014 By Linda Dessau

There is a lot of information out there, and the people in your network are probably feeling overwhelmed by it all. This can be an unfortunate source of stress for them, but it’s also an important opportunity for you.

What is content curation?

Content curation is the process of scouring the Internet, filtering out the junk (unfortunately there’s a lot of that), and discovering the most valuable, relevant and helpful content about a particular topic. By sharing those gems with your network, you accomplish these important objectives:

Build your personal brand (reputation) as an expert in the topic
Be more active and visible on social media
Enhance your relationships by being helpful

(Guess what? Those are also three of the most important goals of business blogging!)

Whether you share other people’s content on your own blog, on social media, or in other ways (we’ll cover these options in a separate post), it’s worth learning how to do it well.

Here are the three steps I recommend for getting started with content curation:

1. Define your content categories

Folders for content curation categories — © 4designersart – Fotolia.com

Just as it’s essential to create and stick to a set list of categories on your business blog, it’s also important to mindfully select the topics you will share about on social media.

Start with the problem you solve with your particular product or service. Then branch out to a few related topics. Filter all of these possibilities through the lens of what will be most valuable, interesting and relevant to your ideal customer.

For example, while I blog exclusively about business blogging and social media, on social networks I also share resources about small business, marketing, and productivity, because I know that will be helpful to my ideal customers (small business owners and marketing professionals who serve small businesses). I also share local items to support charities and businesses in Barrie (because blogging is giving).

By curating a set list of topics, you send a unified message of what your business is about. (Click to tweet)

2. Organize your content sources

Content is likely flowing to you in an abundance of formats, but there are tools that make it easier to quickly find what you need, or save something to come back to later.

In email:

You can apply labels, filters, folders or rules to group together your best sources into categories so their latest contributions are always at your fingertips. With Gmail, for example, the “Promotions” and “Social” tabs can be a treasure trove of resources you may want to share with your network.

On social media:

On Twitter, you can create a list for each of the categories you want to curate content from. As you discover new sources of people who are either creating or sharing the best articles in those topics, add their Twitter account to your list.

Once you’ve created your lists, organize them for easy viewing with the free social media dashboard Hootsuite (see: How to Spend Only 10 Minutes Per Day on Twitter).

On Facebook, you can create lists of friends who tend to share content that would be useful to your audience. You can also use interest lists to organize company pages the same way. Then when it’s time to curate (see #3 below), you can filter your view to only see the posts from people who share about particular topics.

On LinkedIn, join groups that center around the topics you’ve defined in your categories. Then you can browse discussions in these groups for links people have shared.

You certainly don’t need this level of organization in all these social networks, and some (Facebook) are more finicky than others. Experiment with the network(s) you use the most.

Outsourcing tip: Once you’ve identified your sources, curation can easily be outsourced. Ask a team member to review blog posts, social media updates, or newsletters from these people and gather up links for you to approve and post.

3. Batch your curation time with social media scheduling tools

Of course you can curate content immediately as you find it, but unfortunately that can interrupt whatever activity you were doing and take you down a rabbit hole of unproductivity. That’s one of the biggest complaints I hear from business owners who are trying to incorporate more content/social media marketing.

Instead, schedule specific time in your week for checking your best content sources, exploring the web, learning new ideas, and sharing the best of what you find. By setting a time limit and a goal of curating content, you turn what could have been aimless wandering (which Alexis Grant says also has its benefits) into a purposeful marketing activity.

Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite (and there are many others) allow you to schedule social media updates in order to spread them through the week. This is a more balanced approach and ensures your social media streams will have consistent activity that provides value to your readers.

If you come across a relevant article outside of your set curation times, email it to yourself, add it to a bookmarks folder, or try the superbly simple saved.io (thanks to Belle Beth Cooper for the discovery).

Remember: Whenever you schedule content on social media, check back for reactions so you can continue the conversation. (Click to tweet)

As an important extension of creating your own original content about your area of expertise, curating content about that topic helps solidify your credibility as a valuable resource. These initial steps will get you started, and in a companion post I will offer details about how to quickly share your curated content.

Want help with your content curation? Learn more about our content curation services!

Mastering the 3 Cs of Social Media

March 10, 2014 By Linda Dessau

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Small business owners constantly tell me that blogging and social media are just too much work. The goal of this blog and my training workshops is to pass along tips and techniques that help you make the most of your time and get the best results from your efforts.

I also want to empower you to make decisions about what and how to outsource to others. In a three-part series for SteamFeed, I interviewed social media strategist Brooke Ballard of B Squared Media about the 3 Cs of social media, and how you can automate or outsource these tasks.

I shared a description of the first article in an earlier post. Here’s a quick link in case you missed it: How to Manage the 3 Cs of Social Media, Part One

If you want to receive all of my latest posts by email, click here to subscribe to the weekly Blogging Tips newsletter.

How to Manage the Flow of Social Media Conversation – The 3 Cs, Part Two

With so many other moving pieces to manage in a business, it can be difficult to keep up with the conversation on social media.

In the second part of my interview with Brooke Ballard of B Squared Media, we delved into how and when to outsource or automate conversation on social media. (Hint: Never automate conversation!)

http://www.steamfeed.com/manage-flow-social-media-conversation-3-cs-part-two/

How to Curate Content for Your Business on Social Media – The 3 Cs, Part Three

In between posting your own content and having conversations, curating content from other experts rounds out your social media marketing strategy.

To understand curation, Brooke Ballard from B Squared Media suggests you think of yourself as a librarian, not an author. Read more in Part Three of this series for SteamFeed.

http://www.steamfeed.com/curate-content-business-social-media-3-cs-part-three/

Are You Curating or Hijacking the Content You Share?

November 19, 2012 By Linda Dessau

Social media networking is all about balance. Ideally, you want to be spending 80% of your time having conversations and sharing other people’s content, and the other 20% of the time sharing your own content and promoting your business.

Content curation is the formal term for sharing other people’s content. It’s a content marketing strategy that helps:

Solidify your credibility as a trusted resource in your topic area (your readers will think, “Sally always finds the best information!”)
Keeps you active on social media without having to always create your own content (imagine calling a prospective client and hearing, “Sure, I know you, you’re always popping up on my screen,”)
Cultivate relationships with the industry experts whose content you’re sharing (even if someone responds with a simple “thank you for sharing,” that could be the start of something. As a bonus, the rest of their network will see that message and may just check you out as well)

As more people realize these benefits and are using content curation (either manually or through software applications created for the purpose), I see some habits that could be unintentionally creating rifts instead of relationships and turning off your readers.

Let’s call it content hijacking, and look at how you may be doing it on your blog or on social media.

Hijacking content on your blog

It’s a legitimate and effective blogging strategy to use someone else’s content as the jumping off point for your own article (as I’ve tried to do in my recent posts about content curation and Twitter).

What I don’t enjoy is when I click on a link and find just a teaser – a summary and/or quote of the original content, so now I have to jump through an additional hoop to get to the content promised by the headline.

If you’re not planning to add to the content, stick with content curation via Twitter and other social media sites. Just be sure not to hijack there, either.

Hijacking content on Twitter

I know that 140 characters isn’t a lot of room. I know that you’re not intentionally plagiarizing. Yet when you post an enticing headline that leads to someone else’s content, without giving proper credit, you’re performing a bait and switch that could leave a bad impression on your network.

Content curation tips that will enhance your relationships and credibility

Read the entire piece of content before you share. Even if you’ve read the person’s work before, or it was recommended by someone you trust, make sure it’s something you truly want to endorse.
Use the author’s Twitter name. If you’ve discovered the content on the web (versus through social media), look for a link to the author’s Twitter account. Look to see if he or she has tweeted a link to the content, and RT (forward) that to your network.
Make room for the credits. If someone else has hijacked content and you want to give credit, go ahead and add the author’s Twitter name when you RT the post. To make room, you can delete the hashtags or replace the headline with a shorter description. Note (and I just learned this myself): If you need to revise the tweet in order to add the credit, use MT instead of RT. MT stands for “modified tweet“).
Acknowledge the source. For extra credits, let your network know where you heard about the content, by adding “via @name.”
Always share links right from Twitter or HootSuite so that you can add the attribution and control what people will see. Beware: if you check a box to “Share with Twitter” from LinkedIn or Facebook, or if you have your account set up to do that automatically, your Twitter followers will just see the headline and link and it will look like a hijacking.
Follow your content stars more closely. Create a Twitter list in HootSuite so that you can quickly and easily discover new content from your favourite experts and share it with your network – with full attribution, of course!

Want to be sure you’re curating and not hijacking? Learn more about our content curation services!

Twitter Tips from Inc.com

October 29, 2012 By Linda Dessau

Thanks to Jeff Korhan for recently posting a link to an Inc.com article, 10 Things You Should Tweet, and to Jon Gelberg for writing the article. It’s one of the best summaries I’ve seen for how to use Twitter to promote your business online.

If you’re not sure what you should be writing in your business’s Twitter updates, check out the article now! Then please come back because I have a few other thoughts for you.

How’s your balance?

On a recent webinar about blog planning, I talked about the balance between networking and marketing when you’re using social media. Too much networking without any promotion, and people won’t know how or when to refer business to you. Too much marketing without any relationship building, and no one will want to go near you.

In another post on Inc.com Hollis Thomases lists 11 Things to Tweet When You Have Nothing to Say, and she puts posting your own content at the bottom as #11.

She mentions the 80/20 rule, which is that 80% of your social media messages should be about other people (I would include connection/conversation in that portion) or showcasing other people’s work, while 20% should be presenting your own content. Nichole Kelly from SME Digital makes the same recommendation in a recent interview.

New! Want help finding great content to share in your Twitter stream? Check out our content curation services!

Your Twitter stream is another website

Like it or not, the minute you set up a Twitter profile, you’ve got another piece of online real estate to look after. A quick glance at your profile page will show someone a lot about how you’re using Twitter, and your balance between networking and marketing.

I suggest you monitor your Twitter page (http://twitter.com/yourTwittername). Anytime you notice that you’re veering over the 80/20 line, make an effort to rebalance the scale.

You’ve only got 140 characters to make an impression on Twitter. Use them wisely and have fun!

P.S. Please connect with me on Twitter @lindadessau.

You Can Stop Trying to Be a Thought Leader On Your Business Blog

October 15, 2012 By Linda Dessau

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 64% of professional services firms surveyed named thought leadership as a goal of their content marketing.

There is definitely a place for thought leadership as a content marketing strategy. It helps to educate your readers and prospective clients about issues that are important in your field. It helps develop and crystallize your own thinking about these issues. Perhaps most importantly, it cements your credibility as a current expert.

Many people think that in order to succeed with blogging for business, they need to produce earth-shattering original content that will catapult them into the realm of visionary thinkers like Steve Jobs, Seth Godin or Oprah Winfrey. However, as I pointed out in a previous post, How to Write a Thought Leadership Post, you do not need to innovate in order to succeed with business blogging.

So I invite you to lower the pressure you may be feeling to innovate as a thought leader – in fact, why not get rid of it altogether and have some fun with this blogging thing?

Who are you trying to impress?

Ultimately, you’re producing a business blog in order to attract new clients who will hire you. These prospective clients don’t need you to invent new theories about what you do, or turn existing theories on their heads. They need you to explain, in clear English, how to solve their problems.

Your blog readers don’t need to revere you, they need to remember you, particularly when there is a need for your services (for themselves or someone they know).

The people who will be most impressed by your thought leadership are your colleagues in the industry. And in no way am I minimizing the advantages of being the kind of leader who others refer to when they want the latest, greatest news and explanations.

I just want you to give yourself some time to evolve into thought leadership, instead of trying to achieve it with every post.

Stepping stones on the path to thought leadership

Creating thought leadership content isn’t the only way to be a thought leader. As you’re creating your own original content that answers your prospective clients’ questions about their problems and how you solve them, you can also be curating the best content that others are creating.

Sharing these resources on social media and your blog will accomplish three things:

It connects you with those thought leaders so your readers associate you with greatness. It can also start or deepen your relationship with the leaders.
Adding your own commentary will demonstrate your insight into what’s happening and shows that you’re on top of things.
You provide your readers with a more accessible route to today’s thought leaders. They may not necessarily want or need to work directly with the people who are creating the concepts – and in some cases it won’t even be possible. People are usually happiest to work with someone they’re already connected to – especially if you can show that you’re incorporating these innovative ideas and practices into your work.

You cannot force thought leadership

I recently finished the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport (thanks to John Jantsch for recommending the book in his equally compelling blog post on the same topic).

The book explains the importance of putting time into mastering your work through deliberate practice, stretching beyond your comfort zone and seeking feedback on your efforts. Newport calls this building “career capital.”

(The book makes the case that if we try to create a business based solely on our passion, before building up this career capital, we may be setting ourselves up for failure.)

Think for a moment about someone you consider to be a thought leader in your industry. It’s likely that one of the things you admire is their years of solid experience – career capital – actively involved in doing whatever they’re writing or talking about.

While you can try to write a thought leadership post, it’s the response to the post that will really determine if you’ve succeeded. For now, you can stop trying to be a thought leader and start working on becoming one. You’ll get there, if you keep blogging consistently, watch other thought leaders for inspiration and stay tuned into industry news.