A content curation system for adding value

When people think about posting content consistently online, there’s two extremes: either they don’t think they have enough to say, or they see it as an opportunity to share all the great things about their business, all the time.

The first extreme probably isn’t true and the second one is likely to push potential clients away! When you’re planning social media posts for your organization, it’s best to be somewhere in the middle.

The balance for your organization might not be the same as someone else’s. But there’s one method of content curation we use at T&S that can help you whatever balance makes sense for you.

We make it a priority to share helpful, interesting third-party content as a significant part of our social media presence.

That helps us establish expertise, avoid being too promotional, and ensure that following us on social media is actually a value-add for others. We find articles, videos, or other content that would be helpful and interesting to our target audience and work that into our plan for each month.

You may be doing something like that naturally, but it streamlines the process to have a system for third-party content. Here’s how we do it.

Collect your sources

Figure out what sources of content regularly post things that your target audience would enjoy. Create a list of the URLs for those sources and save it somewhere you can access it regularly.

Read content

Open all your source websites in your web browser—we find that an extension like Bulk URL Opener for Google Chrome is helpful for this. Click on every title that looks interesting from each source and open each one in a new tab.

Then skim the articles and close the tabs of articles that don’t look good. After that, look through what’s left, read the articles, and add the ones you think your audience would find most interesting to your list of social media updates.

Incorporate it into your plan

We have a spreadsheet for each month that we save social media posts in, but that’s not the only way to do this. You could create posts with links to third-party content directly to your Hootsuite account if you have one.

Because we work on each month’s social media in the month ahead of time, we try to choose third-party content that is pretty recently published so it’s still relevant when it posts a few weeks later.

Curating content in bulk like this is efficient and once it’s done, you can cross it off your list for that month! It takes a little time to get the hang of it, but once you do, it’s a real time saver.