Social media is a beast and a hungry one. To maintain a strong brand presence, you’ve got to fill your social streams with content and then actively engage with your fans and followers daily, plus reach out to new followers and influencers. One problem is that the average lifespan of a tweet is only five minutes to an hour, and a Facebook status update lives for two days at best. So how can you develop enough content to continuously push out interesting stuff without hiring a huge team of content creators? You curate it, of course.
Go beyond the broadcast
When setting up social media programs for clients, we typically start with two concepts: content breadth and brand voice. For content, I recommend that my clients go “beyond the broadcast” and provide content on Facebook and Twitter that becomes a valuable resource to followers—going well beyond news or specials from the company. When curated well, this content can come to represent, and ultimately expand, the brand.
To get enough content without being boring or repetitive you may need to broaden your organization’s brand voice, at least in social media channels. Think a bit outside the lines of your actual brand premise. If you sell a travel product, perhaps your content could include links to destination reviews by travel bloggers, news about airlines and fares, and links to images of great destinations. People who are thinking about traveling or travel frequently will appreciate the content, and when they’re in the market for your travel product, they may think of you. If you hew too narrowly to your own product or topic, you may miss a chance to attract new audiences or to get engaged with an influencer just outside your sphere.
Who knows your brand?
For many brands, curating outside content can be very scary. It means using content that others have developed to build your brand, and that loss of “control” doesn’t always sit well with upper management. But a savvy marketing or product person who’s got their finger on the pulse of your industry could do an excellent job as “editor,” bringing the best of the Web in your niche directly to your followers and fans. In some organizations, this person is also the community manager, engaging with fans in social media environments; in others, many people contribute to curation and social streams. There is no right way to do this. The important thing is that you trust the final editor(s) to make decisions about what’s right for the brand, and trust them to ask the right people for guidance if they feel any hesitation about something they’re planning to post.
Got to get the goods
Once you’ve determined the types of content you’re going to post, and who is going to do the posting, you should work as a team to identify some sources for good content to curate into your social media streams. I’m a big fan of the RSS reader, and I make my clients fans too once they see how great it is to have all the blogs they love delivered right to their desktop or smartphone. So when we’re starting to discuss content curation, they sign up for Google Reader (my reader of choice—but choose one you like), and we start to populate it with blogs and news sources that provide good content for their Twitter or Facebook streams. As we find new content sources, we add them in.
Another great source is daily e-mail newsletters—like Smart Brief on Social Media or one of Travel Weekly’s newsletters—pick a few in your area. And of course we curate right out of our own Twitter and Facebook streams too. Twitter services like Formulists make it easy to pay closer attention to people we engage with and retweet frequently. Choose a few sources and start making some selections; you’ll quickly see where you need to add sources and broaden your reach.
Finding a balance
For most brands, you’ve got some content of your own that you want to get out there, and that’s one of the key goals of a lot of social media marketing, right? To generate awareness of your product or service. So while it would be nice to think that people will be aware of you through your resourceful content curation alone, it’s also good to remind them from time to time of who you are and what you do and why they should engage with you. Just do it gently and in a nice way, so you don’t sound spammy or like a brand broadcaster.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule on how much of your content you should balance with content from others; for some of my clients it’s a 1:12 ratio, for others it’s 1:2. What you decide to do will depend on your brand voice, expectations and community. Just don’t make the mistake of deciding that it should be 1:2 only because you don’t have time to curate 10 items a day, yet you want to put out one broadcast item per day.
Unleash yourself from your desk
While the act of finding good content can be time-consuming, it will get faster over time once your sources are developed. Another major time-saver is scheduling the content in advance, so you’re not tied to your Twitter page all day. I’m a user and big fan of HootSuite (which is especially good if multiple people are curating and scheduling content), but CoTweet is also good—and I’ve recently started testing Timely, a very simple interface that allows for advance scheduling while selecting the optimal time for your followers to see your tweets.
Think through your content needs, set up some processes, find your best editors and your brand will be flush with content in no time.
