Tips to Avoid Wasting your Content Curation Efforts

Nothing has improved promotion and customer relationships as much as content marketing.

Businesses everywhere use content (blogs, social media posts, and other formats) to educate their customers, and improve their products.

But while we are talking about content, which generates 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing, we’re often forgetting one key category: content curation.

Marketing teams can’t handle producing all content on their own, and aggregating and sharing third-party content results in significant boosts to customer satisfaction.

Content curation also helps with:

• Building authority
• Improving brand awareness
• Fostering B2C communication
• Innovation

Just because you’re “borrowing” content doesn’t mean it can’t help you increase your ROI.

Here’s what you can do to personalize your content curation efforts:

1) Add personal notes instead of only sharing links

Link sharing is the number one way to curate content.

However, if you really want to improve your content curation, add a few personal notes.

While you can quote a sentence or briefly describe what the article is about, your real goal should be to provide perspective on why it matters.

There’s a lot of content being published every day, and it’s becoming impossible for users and potential customers to keep track of everything.

If you really want to establish your business as the industry authority, explain why the content you’ve selected matters to your customers.

2) Monitor trends and curate content accordingly

Evergreen content always works, but trends are just as important.

79% of marketers use social media to find content for their strategy exactly because they want to stay on top of trends.

And if your potential customers see news from you first, they’ll develop loyalty faster.

It also gives you the opportunity to establish yourself as a credible resource they can rely on when they want to get the latest information on the state of industry.

3) Ask

If you want to personalize your content curation efforts, start posing questions.

This can be as simple as offering commentary on a topic your audience is interested in, and asking for their opinion.

Not only will this give you an additional item in your content calendar, but it will also show your customers that you value their input. Today, when customers decide which brands they’ll be loyal to, they pay attention to personalization and the business’ image.

Image source: freemansocialmedia.com

Moving forward you can even use the feedback your followers gave you for your content curation efforts, and let it shape your strategy.

4) Connect the curated content to your business

The best content strategy mixes combine directly promotional content with content curation.

However, there’s no reason your curated content can’t be promotional, as well.

Connect the borrowed content you’re sharing to your business.

For example, if you have a customer relationship management software, you may share statistics such as: “87% of businesses use cloud-based CRM systems.”

In order to personalize it, you can connect it to your business by showing how you make cloud-based systems easy for everyone involved.

If you’re sharing an article on industry innovation that you’ve been implementing, why not mention that?

Even though the point of content marketing is to educate your customers before turning them into buyers (increasing the retention rate in the process), there’s no reason not to give credit where credit is due.

5) Include your users (user-generated content)

Users love collaborating with businesses they trust.

Even though the usual content curation procedure includes sourcing articles and re-sharing them on social media, one of the best ways to personalize your content curation strategy is by including your users.

It can also help you acquire more new users, as 76% of people trust content made by individuals more than by brands.

For example, IBM often uses user-generated content as a part of their content curation strategy.

Source: IBM’s Instagram profile

This works especially well because IBM isn’t a photogenic business, so they’re focusing on showing the people behind the work.

And users appreciate being a part of the business’ strategy.

6) Contrast & compare

If you’re focusing on trends, don’t forget to look back every once in a while.

News travels fast, and we consume it faster today than ever, so retrospective and comparison can be a good way to capture attention – even if you’re using borrowed content.

You can:

• Analyze different points of view
• Juxtapose developments in your industry 10 years ago with the current developments
• Share your personal observations

 This all gives you more authority in customers’ eyes, as you show that you’re not just staying informed about new developments – you are also noticing how the industry has changed, and using that insight to innovate it even more.

Image source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/01/13/infographic-templates

Infographics work especially well, and they get 650% higher engagement than text-only posts.

7) Curate according to audience segments and channels

Some users love LinkedIn, while others swear by Facebook.

You should know how to use both, especially if significant portions of your (potential) audience are using them.

However, that doesn’t mean that you can use same content and simply re-share it to different channels.

Instead, consider making two separate strategies and measuring and tracking user engagement.

The key factors to look at are:

• Popular types of consumed content
• Audience interests
• Channel purpose

In our Facebook and LinkedIn example, you would be looking at:

1) Types of content:

Facebook – Posts, images and videos

LinkedIn – Status updates and blog posts

2) Audience interests:

Facebook – Heartwarming content that builds relationships, and doesn’t drive immediate sales

LinkedIn – Professional development

3) Channel purpose:

Facebook – Relationship-building

LinkedIn – Immediate sales (as a means of obtaining competitive advantage)

Certain audience segments will naturally gravitate towards one channel or the other, so it’s important to understand which channel they use – and how they use it.

8) Empower partners and customers

Most customers want brands to sound like people, not businesses. And while that can seem tricky while keeping your revenue in mind, it’s important to show the human side (just like IBM does).

Image Source: Marketing Week

One of the best ways to personalize content curation is by empowering your partners and your customers.

For example, if your business partners recently launched a new feature, or offer a feature complimentary to your business, you can share it. It not only creates very positive brand image, but it also provides your customers with additional value.

You can use the same tactic to empower your customers, as well.

User-generated content is one way of using it for content curation, but you can also include your customers in surveys and case studies.

Tools for personalizing content curation

Monitoring trends in order to personalize content curation can take a lot of time. A lot of marketers use a combination of RSS feeds, Twitter lists, and a plethora of other sources.

However, marketers who want to save their time use DrumUp.

DrumUp does your content source research for you. There’s no need to spend hours finding information your customers will appreciate. Our algorithms recommend the best stories.

You can also cut your content curation management time to a bare minimum after setting up a workflow and periodically reviewing it.

And while personalizing content curation is a great way to improve your overall content strategy, it’s important to use the right tools.

With them, you can focus on what matters: your customers, and content that brings results.

“Theory by Simon Sinek” | Image by themarketingsage.com

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How to Run Social Media Marketing Experiments (with 73 Ideas)

Running social media marketing can be hard when you have no idea where to begin. Social media is vast and the abundance of social media marketing options leaves social media managers undecided on which is the best strategy to follow. Fortunately, there exists a way to identify top performing social media strategies. You can identify top performing strategies with maximum ROI by running social media marketing experiments.

So, how do you run a social media marketing experiment?

Here’s a clean, 6-step process.

1. Set goals
2. Prioritize goals
3. Design the experiment
4. Test ideas
5. Analyze tests & glean insights
6. Automate top-performing ideas

Before we proceed with details on every step, here are a few characteristics of social media that you should consider before designing social media marketing experiments.

1. On social media, there are controllable (content quality, target audience and impact) and uncontrollable factors (organic reach).

2. Every experiment can have different outcomes based on different inputs. For instance, the experiment when boosted by say employee advocacy will show different results when not.

The 6-step process to setting-up, running and measuring a social media marketing experiment

1. Set goals

Social media needn’t be only a marketing tool. Social media can be used to impact every aspect of a business, from its inception to revenue-generation and customer support. In 2018, social media managers are aware of this fact, which is why it’s important to question ourselves how much value we’re getting from the time and resources spent on social media.

Goal-setting is one way to answer this question. In fact, goal-setting may also have a direct impact on an individual’s performance and happiness, according to a Harvard study.

The following is a list of social media goals that you can consider when planning your social media marketing experiments.

13 social media goals you could consider chasing

1. Product/company branding

2. Increasing brand awareness

3. Driving social media traffic

4. Lead generation

5. Revenue generation

6. Increasing brand engagement

7. Building communities

8. Providing customer support

9. Multiplying press mentions

10. Growing co-marketing opportunities

11. Acquiring brand advocates

12. Collecting UGC, reviews and testimonials

13. Launching products

Broad or narrow, these goals provide context to your social media marketing activities and help you measure them accurately. It’s best to create experiments that have no more than one goal, so your efforts are focused and easier to measure.

Consider, for instance, that you have created two social media posts – Post A and Post B. Post A has performed better in terms of social media engagement but Post B has performed better in terms of social media traffic. Which post would you consider a success?

Having goals in place prevents this kind of ambiguity.

2. Prioritize goals

Every business has multiple goals that can be reached via social media marketing. But every business also has to deal with limited resources and budgets. That’s where priorities become important. Priorities help you decide where and what to focus your resources on.

There are tons of systems that you can use to effectively prioritize goals. The trick is prioritizing what will give you most important results. How do you identify those goals?

At DrumUp, we use the Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort system. Here’s how it works.

1. List all of your goals on sheets.

2. Score every goal on Cost-Targeting-Control-Effort on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 implying most and 1 implying least.

3. Calculate an average rounded off score that you can refer to for decision-making.

4. Work on the easiest goals first and make your way up to the harder goals, or prioritize but whatever is most necessary.

This process may eat-up your time in the beginning, but once you get used to it, using this process will save you tons of invaluable time.

3. Design the experiment

Once you have prioritized goals, it’s time to design an experiment. Doing this is simple. You need a bucket of ideas and hypotheses on how those ideas will help you achieve your goal. When connecting the idea-hypothesis-outcome, ask yourself what you’ll do and how it’ll lead to achieving your goal and why that will be the outcome.

For instance, if the goal is to increase brand awareness, you can accomplish this outcome in so many different ways. You can create a social media contest or you can run social media ads. It’s best to conceptualize the experiment in detail at this stage so you can set expectations and predict the outcome accordingly.

Here are different ways in which you can get inspiration to conceptualize experiments –

1. Follow top social media marketers and read their blogs for ideas

2. Identify prevailing social media trends and follow them

3. Conduct competitive research and see what industry leaders are doing

Once you have a concrete idea, decide on what the task will entail and how you’ll measure the results with respect to the goal. If website traffic or conversions are the goal, you’ll need to create custom URLs using URL builders to ensure conversion-tracking.

4. Test the experiment

Now you’re ready to test your social media experiments. When testing social media experiments, you need to bear some basics in mind.

1. Never test more than one thing at a time. If you want to be sure of what’s moving the needle for a particular goal, it’s critical to ensure that you don’t have conflicting readings. For instance, if you want to increase traffic to your website, any social media posts that is clickable can contribute to the effort. That’s why it’s essential to know which posts/theme of posts you want to focus on.

2. Refer to the right metrics to measure posts. Typically, goals decide which metrics you should monitor. For instance, if you want to increase brand awareness on social media you would choose impressions as the key metric instead of choosing clicks or something that’s less representative.

3. Run each experiment for a sufficient period of time. If the experiment is minor, you can run it for shorter time intervals such as a week or two weeks. If the experiment is major, for instance, if it involves a re-haul of your entire social media marketing strategy, then it’s best to run it at least for a month or two months.

4. Use A/B testing on every set of posts. The content you create for your social media experiment should ideally be A/B tested for the best results. That’s because you won’t know the full potential of your social media posts unless they are in their best forms. For A/B testing, you need to be able to track each version of a post, so you’ll need custom URLs.

5. Ensure that the experiments are all closed-loop. You don’t need any loose ends or blind spots in an experiment. If you have any, try and fill them in. For instance, if you want to measure the effect of your content on revenue, you need to be able to see the actual purchase and that might need some development effort on your website. Don’t shy away from collaborating with developers when needed.

5. Analyze tests & glean insights

After an experiment is run, you’ll need to analyze results and learn from what you’ve done. While you’ll want to know if the experiment worked, you’ll also want to know to what extent it worked and what exactly made it work. It’s also useful to know what didn’t work and why, so you can apply those learnings to future social media campaigns.

Social media experiment tracking is an exact science, with numbers. When running experiments it’s important to process the statistical significance of the results. You’ll want to ensure that the results aren’t because of chance factors and don’t include false positives and exclude false negatives.

One way to ensure that your data is clean and that your experiments are actually worth investing in, you could repeat the experiment a couple of times and see if the results stay consistent. You can also repeat experiments by changing factors and understanding how you can future amplify results.

6. Automate top-performing ideas

Once you have consistent results stemming from particular experiments, you can make the most of those ideas by automating them. For instance, if you know that your blog posts bring a ton of traffic to your website and convert new users, you can set-up your blog on an RSS feed and set it on an auto-posting schedule.

When automating top-performing ideas, you’ll need the help of automation tools. Even if you can’t automate entire processes, you can definitely automate large portions of the process. Once the process is automated, you can save a ton of time and be more productive.

Here are different ways in which you can automate your social media marketing –

1. Save social media posts of different campaigns in different libraries on a social media management tool such as DrumUp, from where you can set-up an extensive publishing schedule.

2. Add RSS feeds of your blog and top news agencies or blogs and set them up on an automatic publishing schedule, so you never have to publish a post manually.

3. Follow influencers on Twitter and add them to Twitter lists, from where you can follow their work and retweet/engage with posts when required.

73 social media marketing experiments to try today

• Use Twitter’s advanced search to find potential clients
• Try social media ads and native content promotion
• Try employee advocacy for social media
• Activate social media follow and social media share plugins on your webpages
• Test different positions for social media plugins (consider mobile placement)
• Publish content when your followers are online and active
• Publish content when your followers and offline and inactive
• Publish content during lunch break, on the weekends, during commute times and on public holidays
• Publish content late nights and early mornings
• Publish more frequently
• Publish less frequently
• Craft short and punchy post content
• Craft long and descriptive post content
• Use popular hashtags
• Use less popular or similar to popular hashtags
• Include testimonials or social proof in social media posts
• Add emojis to social posts
• Create the same post for all social media platforms (cross-post)
• Create custom posts for each social media platform
• Post questions and quizzes
• Run contests
• Conduct QnAs and AMAs
• Create interview sessions on text and video
• Publish and curate infographics
• Share GIFs and short videos

  

• Post behind the scenes content
• Work with disappearing content (statuses and stories)
• Run promotional campaigns (discount campaigns)
• Host live giveaways clubbed with planned rant sessions
• Create Twitter Moments and Instagram Stories
• Share SlideShares via social media posts
• Post audio clippings and podcasts
• Livestream events
• Experiments with music on videos and podcasts
• Leverage social media analytics dashboards to gain insights
• Create short and long social media videos
• Use photographs of your team, clients and partners
• Conduct events to collect UGC

 

• Co-host live events
• Run co-marketing activities on social media
• Try Twitter chats
• Join and work within LinkedIn and Facebook groups
• Build a presence in LinkedIn communities
• Get C-suite executives involved on social media
• Run campaigns for brand advocacy on social media
• Pin important posts
• Comment on active social media posts and conversations
• Use Facebook for remarketing
• Build a Facebook Messenger bot
• Use LinkedIn inMail for marketing
• Follow top customers’ Life Events
• Add CTAs to all links and content you share
• Add Click-to-tweets within blog posts
• Experiment with graphic design to pull attention to parts of posts
• Use social media tools to find the right times to share content
• Work with evergreen content to get more social media referrals
• A/B test types of social media content
• Play around with colors and typography
• Test images with people vs objects
• Optimize landing pages to convert social media referrals
• Build an email list with gated social media contests
• Use humorous social media content
• Create a band persona/character to endear customers
• Connect with customers on social media and activate them to be advocates
• Experiment with tone
• Try different types of copy
• Target different groups of people
• Work with different time zones

Wrap

There are infinite possibilities in social media marketing if you consider all the variables in content, publishing and advertising. To develop the best formula for your brand, you need to run social media experiments. Remember social media trends are always changing and it’s always a good idea to test new ideas every year or so. Keep an eye on your social media analytics and be open to making changes when required, this mindset will help you make the most of your social media efforts.



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How to Get More Twitter Followers (Without Creating Content)

Numbers matter. Influencers, current and future customers consider the size of your Twitter following when deciding whether to follow your or not. You probably won’t even consider your own brand a social media success unless you have grown a sizeable following on Twitter. Even though your number of Twitter followers isn’t indicative of the quality of your posts, the number matters. Here are 5 ways you can get more Twitter followers now.

1. Ensure that your brand is follow-worthy

Customers today want to connect with brands. It’s not enough to have a ton of content. Unless you are authentic and exceptional, customers won’t engage with you on Twitter. Millennials, for instance, are very brand-conscious, but they’re very difficult to engage. However, with the right content, partnerships and social outlook, you can catch their attention.

Start building a brand that speaks to your target groups on their level. In their language. And about things that matter to your audience.

2. Curate content from RSS feeds, the web and your resources

Instead of always creating your own content, you can curate content from strategic sources. What are strategic sources? Well, non-competing brands within your industry, customers and partners qualify as strategic sources. You can use this form of interaction to show these people that you are interested and that you care. At the same time, you can also get access to free, high-quality content that you can share with your audience.

You could even automate curation using a content curation app such as DrumUp, which has RSS feed reading and keyword based content curation activities.

3. Craft well-organized automation queues

Once you have curated content, you can save posts in smart social media automation queues to avoid publishing manually. Social media automation queues are great for engagement because they allow you more control over quality of posts and publishing. You can save posts according to themes, dates and partners and set the publishing schedule to match your audience’s content consumption.

DrumUp’s social media management dashboard has “content libraries” using which you can create smart automatic queues.

4. Follow influencers, partners and potential customers

The point of following people on Twitter is to get genuine and active people to engage with your brand. So, it’s not a good idea to follow people at random. Instead, you can create distinct and definite groups of people worth following. Influencers, other brands, customers – current and potential, and event managers can, for instance, be groups of people whom you can follow.

Most social media sites already give you suggestions of people to follow based on your network and interests.

5. Interact with prospects via Twitter lists

When you follow a bunch of people you are left with a cluttered Twitter feed and no way to manage their content. Twitter lists offer you means to organize the people you follow in groups, so you can consciously engage with them on a daily basis. Lists can be made public or kept private based on what you want to do with them. Private lists can’t be seen by other people, including those who are a part of those lists.

Instead of creating your own lists, you can also subscribe to other people’s lists. It’s a good idea to subscribe to lists created by influencers in your niche.

Bonus

Answer questions.

The best way to attract Twitter followers is to become an active part of communities to which they belong. These communities don’t have to be on Twitter. They can be on LinkedIn, Facebook or any other social platform. Participate in conversations on these platforms and answer questions that are important to other participants. This is a great way to both build your credibility and Twitter following.

Wrap

There are tons of ways to build a Twitter following organically. The key is to focus on scaling your results without having to scale your efforts. This post provides examples of great ways to begin.

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

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7 Tried & Tested Content Marketing Ideas for eCommerce Businesses to Try Now

According to a recent study, 81% of shoppers conduct research online before making a purchase. It’s no wonder that eCommerce businesses are focused on attracting the attention of such customers via content marketing on various online marketing channels. You’re probably an eCommerce business yourself or an agency in charge of creating content for one.

If you are either, you probably know how hard it is to create content that works and helps you achieve your goals. This post describes 7 content marketing ideas that have worked for other eCommerce businesses for you to try.

Note: [4 out of 7] of these ideas are easier to execute with the help of a social media management and employee advocacy platform like DrumUp.

1. Find artistic social media ambassadors

What you create/curate visually will decide how successful you are on the internet. However, creating visually stunning social media content can be an expensive affair, which is where UGC comes in. Visually inclined social media ambassadors can help you create great content and market it via engaged social media channels.

Check out how Huckberry utilizes it’s ambassador generated social media content.

2. Create How-to or DIY videos featuring products

Instead of simply displaying your products, try and create use-cases for them within your content. The best ways to do this is through How-to and DIY videos that not only feature your products but also describe the best way to use them. How-to videos are great for complex products that typically need guides or manuals and DIY videos are great for products that have multiple use-cases.

Check out how Lowes has created a DIY video around its DIY fireplace kit product.

3. Connect products to celebrities and trends

People are influenced by celebs’ style, food-habits and behaviors in general. eCommerce marketers can use this to their advantage by connecting products to current trends and what celebrities are doing/wearing. To implement this strategy, you first have to identify which celebrities you target groups follow and then follow them to identify occurrences to use in your marketing.

Here’s how Mr Porter connects its products to celebrity lifestyles.

4. Share customer and employee stories

Stories are at the heart of social media. You can drastically improve customer engagement by increasing the incorporation of stories into your content marketing. Anything shared in story form – behind-the-scenes content, employee achievements and struggles, customers’ achievements and struggles – can go a long way in improving the results of your content marketing.

Check out the engagement on stories shared by Asda. Customers care about and connect with well-narrated stories.

Note: You can get more engagement and reach more of your target groups by getting employees to share your stories via DrumUp’s employee advocacy platform.

5. Display products and promotions via engaging GIFs/videos

Yet another creative way to share products and promotions is via engaging GIFs/videos. Creating GIFs/videos today isn’t much of a task, considering the availability of several easy-to-use GIF/video editing tools. The easiest way to incorporate GIFs/videos, however, is by curating them with the right caption and connecting them to your products/services. When doing so, ensure that you verify the license of the content that you wish to share.

Here’s how Net-A-Porter incorporates GIFs into its content marketing.

Note: DrumUp lets you curate copyright free GIFs from GIPHY within the dashboard.

6. Curate relevant content from non-competing entities

Content curation not only saves you time and money but also helps you build relationships with marketing allies in your industry. Today, almost every entity on social media runs on collaborations. And you can create collaborations by curating the right content. All you have to do is ensure that you have the right permissions to share engaging content.

Here’s an example of Grazia sharing the right content (with attribution).

Note: DrumUp lets you set-up RSS feeds and keyword based content streams for content curation. The keyword based content streams come with @mention and #tags, making it easy for you to attribute content.

7. Get C-suite executives and employees involved

People connect most with people, which is why you need to get your C-suite executives and employees involved in content marketing. Organic reach when C-suite and executives and employees share will also be much higher than when you share, giving you extra reach and engagement. Employee advocacy is also said to increase conversions, retention and general customer engagement.

Note: With DrumUp’s employee advocacy platform, you can simplify content sharing with employees, gamify participating and track the impact of their shares.

Wrap

Content marketing is the smartest way for eCommerce companies to reach and influence their target groups on online marketing channels. With effective content marketing ideas, you can engage your audience and surpass your content marketing goals.

Featured image by Maykzz@freepik.com

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