Social curation is the key to social media success in the long-run – and it can actually save you time.
What is social media content curation?
In a nutshell, social curation is ‘listening’ to what others have to say and responding to this. It takes your profile from simply ‘broadcasting’ to creating a conversational feel. It involves finding content that your audience will find engaging or useful, and sharing it in a way that supports your own social media objectives.
The content you curate can be from a mix of resources, including email newsletters, social media trending topics, hashtags, Google Alerts, news articles and thought-leadership features.
The purpose of your social curation activity is to repackage the content in a way that’s quickly accessible for your audience. For example, you might take a news article, summarise it in a few short lines, then share a link for your audience to read the full thing.
Why is social curation important?
1. Save time coming up with fresh ideas to post about – firstly, social curation can actually save you time – it feeds your content ideas, meaning you don’t necessarily need to create posts from scratch every time.
2. Project listening – social curation also shows you’re listening, demonstrating how your view is informed by everything else that’s going on in your industry. In turn, this boosts your brand’s authority in the eyes of your audience.
3. Stay on top of social media algorithms – social curation helps you to stay on top of social media algorithms and the frequency of content you need to keep them ‘happy’.
4. Extend your social post ‘lifespan’ –depending on the platform you’re using, your posts will have different estimated lifespans (the time your post is visible on others’ newsfeeds before its engagement/effect begins to decay):
- Twitter – 15-18 minutes
- Facebook – 6 hours
- LinkedIn – 24 hours
- Instagram – 48 hours
By resharing your content, and reframing this around the views of others, you can extend the visibility of your posts, ensuring their value to your business doesn’t decay as quickly.
5. Improve performance and reach objectives more quickly – social curation ultimately increases your profile’s visibility, without seeming to ‘overload’ your audience with content. As a result, it also increases engagement and profile performance.
How can you curate your social platforms successfully?
Social curation should comprise a mix of different activities, such as:
- Resharing others’ posts (with comments)
- Resharing your page’s posts (with additional information, or into groups or onto personal pages to extend their reach)
- Maxing out on the full functionality of your social platforms – for example, repackaging posts into newsletters on LinkedIn, or sharing stories on Instagram to promote content that may be of interest to your audience.
There are lots of hidden tools in different social media platforms, so make sure to do your research to make sure you’re making the most of these.
The important thing with social media curation is little and often. Even if you can only spare 15 minutes each week, dedicate that time to sharing others’ insights and adding your views to key industry trends. The results you’ll see in your social reach and engagement will prove more than worth it!
If you’d like to understand how your social media platforms could work better for your business, sign up for your free communications review:
