Content Marketing

How to Use Content Curation to Build a Social Media Audience

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One of the essential parts of online marketing is thought leadership.

It establishes you as an expert and increases your influence.

That’s one of the fundamental reasons for blogging and demonstrating your expertise.

But you also want to pass along other people’s content as well.

Consistently sharing solution’s for people in your industry will boost your credibility and give you attention.

You’ll build a social media following who’s paying attention and interested in what you have to say.

Here’s how to use content curation to build your social media audience.

Get Your Inputs

You first need to find the top industry blogs to track. There are several ways to do this.

Go to AllTop.com and subscribe to the major blogs in your industry or niche.

Head over to FollowerWonk and look for major bloggers and journalists in your space.

Finally, use Google Alerts to set up searches for your keywords or other niche topics.

Set Up Your RSS

Now you need to use an RSS reader (like Google Reader) to keep track of this incoming content.

Use your Reader to manage each feed you just found. Also make sure your Google Alerts result feeds will automatically update in your Reader.

Curate Your Content

Manually sift through your content and pull out what’s good.

You can quickly scan the headlines and pull out a few that look interesting.

Now scan each page you found and determine if it’s really good enough to pass along to your audience.

You can usually tell in the first few seconds how professional the site is, how good the content is, and if your target audience will like it or not.

Schedule For Peak Performance

Once you’ve found good content, schedule it to update automatically throughout the day.

Your two best options are Timely or Buffer.

Timely will automatically schedule and post your articles based on past performance. And Buffer allows you to set predetermined intervals so you have more control.

Add some commentary to show it’s authentic and real. You don’t want it to seem like you’re completely automating everything.

Cross Pollinate

Later in the day, find out what is working best (based on engagement, click-through-rates, etc.) and post it to other social media channels like Facebook or LinkedIn.

Use Twitter to experiment and post a lot through out the day. Then re-use your best stuff for these other networks. They don’t move as fast, and one really good post per day is probably enough.

Now make this a consistent process. It will only take 10 minutes a day, but will help you double your social media results.

And best of all, you can systemize this process.

So while you focus on the important stuff, other people can help you schedule consistent, fresh, interesting content that your audience will love.

Get long-term ROI.

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