How to Feed the Content Monster
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Feed the Content Monster: How to Curate Content

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Learning to curate content for social media is a valuable and learnable skill. What is the content monster? This is the void for content marketers between content creation and content sharing. The content monster needs to be fed consistently. Content marketing is an excellent way for brands and small businesses to reach their clients and prospective clients. If you are creating your media or blog content, content creation is a time-consuming and important task. Most blogs and businesses aren't producing an original video or blog article each day. If you do have the time and talent to create great quality content, you still need to share more than one thing per day on social media. So, how can you feed the content monster and curate content to share?

First, I'll explain a few social media terms, so you have a good understanding of my topic, and then I'll dig into where you can feed your content monster.

What is Content Curation?

Content curation isย finding targeted, interesting content to share on social media. To build a solid, trusted social network, you need to enhance your original content with other content. This content should reenforce your brand message, boost your social media presence, and help create topic authority with social media optimization.

“Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. ย The work involvesย sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. ย A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community.ย It isnโ€™t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition: ย  They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.

Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat; it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation.”ย from Beth Kantor

What is Content Creation?

Writing a blog post, producing a video, designing a graphic. Creating original media to share with the world. These are all forms of content or content marketing:

  • Blogging
  • Vine videos
  • Telling a visual story on Instagram
  • Pinning on Pinterest
  • Long-form posts with images on Google+
  • Visual content with text on Tumblr
  • Short form micro-blogging on Twitter
  • Facebook posts
  • YouTube videos

What is Content Marketing

The process of creating media to share who you are and what you are about without a hardball sales approach.

โ€œContent Marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, youโ€™re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.โ€ from Copyblogger.

More reading: How to Curate Content Better

How to Curate Content and Feed the Monster

The amount of quality content that you create will be far less than the social media content that you'll share which creates a need for more content curation. Sharing a balanced mix of your content and other's people's content is important.

A few reasons a good idea to share other people's content:

  • They'll appreciate it and hopefully, reciprocate by sharing your content.
  • It can start a conversation with the person or brand.
  • Being generous is always a good thing.
  • It reenforces your brand message when you boost it with other expert opinions.
  • Provides value to the people who follow you.

There are many different places that you can find content. The key is to create a plan before you start looking, so you know what you're looking for. Create a social media marketing editorial calendar, so you know how many different types of posts you'll be creating and what your brand message is, so you stay on target.

Where Can You Find Great Content to Share?

Theses are a few of my daily go-to sources for great content.

Alltop:ย A fantastic content curation website co-founded by Guy Kawasaki. ย Alltop is โ€œthe online magazineย rack of the web.โ€ Itโ€™s populated by the TOP blogs from around the web, and hundreds of topics are sorted alphabetically for easy search. Itโ€™s the ultimate content curation site since you can add the feeds from your favorite blog (they must beย on Alltop) to create a personal page of your favorites. When you come to the website,ย go to your custom MyAlltop page and voila, great information to read and shareย with your followers.

my alltop

Feedly:ย Feedly is an RSS reader that pulls in previews of thousands of blog sites. This is your main view on Feedly. You can view your content all mixed into one big group or be even more organized and search by topics you create.ย You can create different little sections for quickly finding content that you want to read and share.

feedly

Using the left sidebar navigation, you can select different tabs and view each section separately. You populate each tab with the blogs that you want to be sorted into that topic. Being organized when you set up Feedly will make your content curation a breeze!

StumbleUpon: Is a unique discovery site. Using the StumbleUpon Chrome extension, you can give posts that you like a thumbs up (positive review), and this helps StumbleUpon find great content for you. You also choose topics that you like and can Stumble by subject. StumbleUpon is fun because once you've put some time into StumbleUpon, it finds relevant and exciting content for you that is pre-liked by other Stumblers. It's like hitting a big randomizer button for content, and then BAM a great post, video, or photo pops up.

stumbleupon

Content can truly go viral on StumbleUpon getting hundreds of thousands of views – even up to a million! Wow! Using StumbleUpon to help find content will also help your blog perform better on StumbleUpon as you build your own Stumble mojo.

stumbleupon

HootSuite RSS Syndication

Within the HootSuite dashboard or using the Hootsuite Hootlet Chrome extension, you can add any RSS feed to an RSS syndication within Hootsuite. With a few clicks, you can add your favorite blog content to your Twitter feed, Facebook, Linkedin, or Google+ Page.

Pinterest: is the ultimate in content curation. You can use the search box to find interesting content or search by topic.

Pinterest

Pinterest also recommends content to you in several ways: by showing other places that pin has been pinned and recommending similar pins below the pin, you are looking at. You can use your Pinterest boards to save your curated content and find it easily in the future.

pinterest

The Keys to Good Content Curation

  1. Don't share everything at once! You need to organize your content and share it at optimal times on your social channels.
  2. Get organized with Hootsuite, Sprout Social or your favorite content management platform.
  3. Be consistent and share relevant content on a daily basis.
  4. Follow interesting people and brands. Share their content.

A very important thing to remember is that you are curating otherโ€™s contentย NOT stealing it.ย Per Steven Rosenbaum, โ€œTake the time to give attribution, links back, and credit. The sharing economy works because weโ€™re each sharing our audiences, and providing the value of our endorsements. If you pick up someoneโ€™s work and put it on your blog, or mention a fact without crediting the source, youโ€™re not building shared credibility. Youโ€™re just abusing someone elseโ€™s effort.โ€ I would also add that this goes for tweets, posts or any other content. It is easier to share on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook than it is so cut, paste and steal someone elseโ€™s work. Hit retweet or share.ย Be cool. Donโ€™t steal.

I hope this givesย you some ideas on how you can feed the content monster and rock your content curation!

How to Feed the Content Monster

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12 Comments

  1. Pinned! ย Awesome as always, Peg. You turned me on to Feedly a few months back on a HubSpot webinar and I haven’t looked back. I’m curious about StumbleUpon. Have you found it to be useful to spreading your own content, or mainly for finding good stuff to share? Debating whether it’s worth a go (also considering Reddit), but there are only so many hours in a day!

  2. alisammeredith ย StumbleUpon is great for finding content and it’s great if people Stumble your blogs. On Reddit and StumbleUpon, it’s frowned upon to share your own blog posts so it’s not like Pinterest where you can add in your post mixed with other content. If someone else submits your post to Reddit or StumbleUpon, you can give them a boost. Is that clear as mud? ๐Ÿ™‚

  3. Ha! Just getting caught up on my blog reading tonight. I mentioned you in the Copyblogger comments today. And you mentioned them in your article.ย 

    Sandra Sallin and I were both calling for this after that incredible HOA you and Rebekah Radice guested on. I think Ryan Hanley needs to have you on for an encore.ย 

    ~Lori

  4. I realize that you have to implement a Give and Take process in having a content Curation because if you share others content they would also share what you’ve share. I also participate on some of your mentioned curation sites. Thanks Peg!

  5. I usually go to Feedly for content curation and didn’t realize that you can get viral content which is worth curating from StumbleUpon.

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