If you’ve read my previous posts, I’m hoping that I’ve convinced you to make content curation a part of your daily social media routine.
However, curating content well is a time-consuming job. What you need is a system.
Today, I’m going to share with you my top-secret methods of content curation, so you, too, can curate content like a boss.
Before we get to the specific tools, I should talk a little more about my method.
I don’t always schedule new content every single day. That would be one way of handling content curation for sure, but you can also do it in a batch once or twice a week, depending on how much content you want to push out.
Normally, I sit down for an hour or so, once or twice a week, and schedule up content for the week, or at least a few days. This ensures that there is always content on my feeds, and it makes my day less fractured.
As a general rule, I usually schedule about 5-7 tweets a day that are curated — in addition to the 2 tweets a day (minimum) that are leading people directly back to my blogs, and the conversations I’m having on Twitter as well. All together, I tweet about 17-20 times per day, depending on how active I am.
With Facebook, I schedule a minimum of one post per day, at peak time. I sometimes also schedule a second post, later in the day.
Depending on how you’re investing your time on social media, you may decide on a different frequency and volume for your social media posts.
However you decide to approach your social media marketing, it can be helpful to create a schedule to follow on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Once you have your schedule setup, you can block off time during the week to curate and schedule your social media posts.
Now that you know how to plan your social posting schedule, the next step will be to find the right tools to simplify your content curation.
Here are five tools that work best for me:
- RSS Feeds: Using a feed reader like Feedly, start subscribing to blogs that talk about subject matters that you, and your audience, are interested in. If you’re a Vegan Chef, for example, you can subscribe to blogs that share vegan recipes, or talk about issues related to consuming less meat. Every time that blog publishes a new post, it will show up in your Feedly account, and all you have to do is a quick scroll through to make sure the content is appropriate to share with your audience before you schedule it to Facebook and Twitter.
- Pinterest: Pinterest is a fantastic source of content. I create boards about different subjects, such as social media, food and travel. Our Vegan Chef could start various boards: vegan desserts, vegan lifestyle, etc. All you need to do is spend about 15 minutes, three times a week going through your Pinterest feed and re-pinning articles that might be of use down the road. Then, when you’re ready to schedule content, go back to Pinterest, click through to the original articles, and share them through Facebook and Twitter.
- Paid content services: if you feel like it’s worth the money, there are several great services out there that will suggest content for you, based on what subjects you tell it to search for. Post Planner for Facebook rocks, and Bundle Post is also a great option.
- Free/Freemium Content Services: these services offer free suggestions, and may also offer scheduling services as well. Klout is great option — a couple others to check out are Pocket Social and Belatrix.
- Hootsuite’s Syndicator: this is my #1 tool, and I use it every single day. Simply put, I use it to subscribe to the RSS feeds of blogs I trust — Mashable, Social Media Examiner, the Constant Contact Blog. Then, when I need to fill my feeds, I check through the newest updates from these sources, and autoschedule them to tweet right from the syndicator. This amazing tool even allows you to set parameters around how often, what days of the week, and what times of the day you want your tweets to go out. You simply put the content in the bank, and Hootsuite handles its publication. If I find a ton of great content, and fill up all of today’s tweets, the autoscheduler just starts pushing them to the next day. It’s awesome.
Once I’m done scheduling up my tweets, I then go back through them and choose ones that I also want to share to Facebook, and use Facebook’s scheduler to put them there.
So there you go!
Get online and start to set up your content curation system. Once you have it in place, it will save you loads of time, and make you look like a social media rock star.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How to Master Content Curation in 5 Easy Steps
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