Content curation is critical to a company’s social media marketing strategy and success. Social content curation is an excellent way to keep the audience engaged by maintaining constant social posting activities. This alone guides their expectations about your brand and your content. As for you, it gives an impression of authority and authenticity, showcasing your awareness and expertise. Social media marketing services providers know what social content curation can do for a business, which you should also be aware of.
What does content curation on social media mean?
Content curation refers to a philosophy or a process wherein the brand, company, or organization need not produce the content it publishes on social media. Instead, a brand can collate content directly related to its products or services and share these content pieces on its social media profile or business page. It pertains to finding relevant content and repositioning such so your target audience may find the information valuable enough to apply or learn from each post you share.
How to curate content for social media sharing?
There are many ways to curate relevant content. Here are some of them.
- Checking email newsletters
- Searching social media channels
- Doing a hashtag search
- Doing a keyword search
- Creating Google Alerts
- Using content curation tools
Let’s crank up the list of how content curation helps your social media marketing strategy.
Ways content curation helps social media marketing
Social content curation…
1) Fills content calendar gaps
Like how you despise fluff in your content, you do not want to fill your content calendar with irrelevant, invaluable fluff. It is called fluff for a reason. In contrast, you cannot exhaust yourself and focus only on creating original content–this can quickly deplete your company’s financial resources. This is how content curation helps, filling your content calendar with relevant, informative, and valuable content.
This perfectly falls into content rules, whether digitally or, more specifically, socially. These are:
- 80/20 rule – 80% of social posts should aim to educate, inform, entertain and inspire and 20% should promote your business explicitly
- 70/20/10 rule – 70% of the content should be safe and standard content appealing to the broader audience, 20% should appeal to new audiences, and 10% are for attracting new audiences
- 50/20/20/10 rule – 50% of the content must be targeted at entertaining the audience, 20% for spreading brand information, another 20% for highlighting brand successes, including small wins, and 10% for hard selling
Content curation strategically occupies 80, 70, and 50% of the said rules. Branded content is original content or content that you create, disseminate, and cross-promote on various official social profiles and pages. There is no workaround here than to make them from scratch. As such, without curated content, your content calendar will surely suffer.
2) Balances organic and promotional content
This is a continuation of the first. Consumers appreciate brands and businesses that care about their target market, not necessarily perceiving them for profit-generating purposes. No customer would like a brand that constantly talks about itself on social media. They want valuable content, specifically content that can address their pain points.
Again, this is where curated content is beneficial for both the brand and consumers. They are typically organic, encouraging social media users to engage with the content without asking them to make a purchase. This is where curated content aids in striking a balance against overly promotional posts.
3) Builds community around the brand
Engagement is the social currency that thrives through authentic content. The higher the engagement rate on each post, the better the brand performance due to cultivated brand awareness. Such awareness eventually leads to loyalty, provided that you manage your social content marketing well enough.
True enough, everything you share on social media creates an opportunity for engagement. Nonetheless, a well-curated social media feed can create a difference. Curated content usually does not have a sale-sy tone on them. Social media users are propelled to engage in content without provisos. The more content you publish, the more engaged your followers are. This can lead to building a fully-engaged and active community.
4) Keeps up with algorithmic requirements
Each social media channel operates around algorithms. That is why you keep seeing similar posts to the ones you liked before. Social media algorithms sort posts to display (or push) on your feed based on relevance. Although, there are social media channels that display feed curation based on publish time. For instance, on Twitter, a tweet has a half-life of 20 minutes. If so, you need to tweet every 20 minutes to stay active and keep your followers engaged.
Creating 12 to 24 tweets every day is a tedious task. So Twitter marketers take advantage of content curation through retweeting, republishing, or repurposing old content – from photos to short videos and links to blog posts.
In a nutshell
While there is no ideal mix of created versus curated content, it is best to consider relevance. Otherwise, if you keep sharing irrelevant content on your social profiles or pages, your target audience ~or the community you have already built~ will tune out. As a result, your content will be perceived as less engaging, and the algorithms will show your content–created or curated–less than expected.
When curating your social content, you want it to be as relevant and informative as possible. Add context to your shared post so your audience will understand the connection between the post and your brand, products, services, people, and everything else you value.
Optimind provides social media marketing services, including preparing an editorial calendar for your social media campaign – may it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social platforms. Let’s talk about your social campaign. Call us!
