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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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What Should You Post on Social Media for Your Startup?

The best news about starting-up in today’s digital landscape is that you grow at practically no cost. All you need is the right idea, at the right time and to be at the right place at the right time. Today’s army of social media bloggers and micro-bloggers are constantly looking for exciting things to post, and you can be the subject of their social media conversations. But the first things you should think about are employing a social media management tool and building a smart social media marketing strategy. While building a social media strategy, here are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself.
Who are you trying to reach?
What are the characteristics of these people? What drives them? What concerns them?
Where do they live?
What gender, economic level, education level do they belong to?
Are they homeowners or renters? Students or working professionals?
Do they play football? Are they bikers? Do they attend music concerts regularly?
Once you know exactly who you’re targeting, you will know exactly what to post. Here are 12 types of content that you should post on social media for your startup.

1. Humorous content

Funny always works. If you can make your audience laugh, they’ll want to know who you are and what you do. It’s natural to be curious about someone who surprises or entertains you. So make your audience laugh. You get extra brownie points for sharing humorous content that’s directly related to your brand, so your audience will both be entertained and made to think about your brand. Here’s an example of that strategy in play on Tinder’s vintage #Tinder post.

The reference to your brand could also be more subtle and playful, like how Birddogs does it. Look at how they’ve showcased their product (men’s shorts) in your face in such a bold yet charming manner.

Another alternative is one where you simply post a “joke of the day” or “meme of the day” by curating content from other sources. Remember to always provide necessary attribution when curating/sharing content.

2. Your product/service updates

What are the latest features on your product? What services have you restructured or added to your business? Both your customers and social media fans eagerly await new and exciting offerings that can make a difference to their lives. And that’s how you must portray your latest updates – as novel solutions to real problems. Your feature/service update in itself could be a powerful social media marketing strategy when designed and timed right. Consider, for instance, Slack’s latest emoji tweaks in the spirit of the FIFA World Cup.

How you present products and features matters. Getting presentation right requires a certain seamless coordination between your product development and social media marketing teams. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, has stressed the importance of interdepartmental collaboration in his book “Hit Refresh”, supporting the suggestion with his own examples and experiments. In 2015, Satya Nadella was spotted using an iPhone at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, where he introduced his audience to the iPhone Pro – an iPhone that supports all Microsoft applications. This partnership was unexpected by welcome by the press and customers, making Nadella’s bold presentation an instant hit. Try and plan all your business activities with marketing in mind. You’ll see that it will pay off, big time.
No update is too small to share. Even design changes can make for great social media posts if you design them to be so.

3. Success stories

Just landed a well-known client? Get them onboard with your marketing. Request their permission to construct a case-study or success story using their experience with you. More often than not, clients are excited about such an opportunity considering it free press, but they usually have concerns about the safety of their confidential information. Address their worries by disclosing your marketing plan in detail, leaving no room for ambiguity. When designing your client success stories, try and get creative. Do a video case-study or success story. Conduct an interview. Keep in mind what your social media audience would want to see.

Even if you’re not B2B, you can have customer success stories of sorts. Look at clothing retailer ModCloth’s #MarriedinModCloth social media initiative. It features a brilliant collection of photographs of customers who picked ModCloth for their wedding boutique. Few strategies work as well as social proof does on social media. Enable social media fans to envision working with you or using your products.
Success stories could also entail your company’s success stories. Just got featured on a predominant publication? Share your pride and happiness with your social media audience. Just employed new interns? Introduce them to your social media audience. People love seeing the faces and minds behind any brand.

4. Customers’ opinions

People are more likely to trust the words of other people, much like themselves. And trust is an important factor for startups, especially those that are new in the market or selling novel concepts or products. For instance, Tesla, despite the overwhelmingly positive press, has always faced issues in actually selling their vehicles. This amusing review that they retweeted could be influential in convincing other potential buyers.

Sharing the opinions of happy clients emphasizes on the fact that you’re capable of taking care of clients and fulfil their needs. But it’s also equally important to find and respond to negative experiences from clients. Every negative comment that you leave unattended is a sign of your brand’s indifference to customer feedback. The great news is that negative feedback can be an opportunity to build trust with your existing and future customers.

Observe how SizzorS salon has responded to one of their customers. It’s important to be respectful while addressing your customer’s queries in the most detailed and specific way possible.

5. Tips & news for your industry

People generally appreciate updates related to their industry, because they want to stay up to date. By providing them with such news, you can become the go-to source for news and tips in the industry. Many startups invest a lot of money in having content marketers create high-quality industry related content so it can help them get search engine and social media traffic. Instead of creating 100% of your content, you can curate top-class content that has already been created. For instance MYXYTY, an internet security solutions company, often shares news and updates related to internet security in a way that appeals to their social media followers.

If you can’t spend enough time manually curating this type of content, you could curate it using a content curation app such as DrumUp. Curate relevant content on DrumUp by setting-up keywords and RSS feeds of your favorite content sources. The content you share can be anything – useful tips, major discoveries, changes in an important law – you know your industry best. Share whatever your audience would like to follow.
When sharing, if you are the first to share and attribute the source using @mentions and #tags, you are likely to benefit from the resulting exposure. DrumUp helps you execute all of this.

6. Data & insights

Data and insights are another great form of social media content to consider sharing. Data and insights are particularly nice when shared in a visual format – as graphs or infographics. They’re not very hard to create either. With the graphics editing apps available in the market today, you can easily turn research and surveys into graphical offerings for your social media audience. Even if you don’t turn it into a graph, you could use the stat to create a compelling headliner connected to your brand.

Check out, for instance, this post that Uber shared in May this year. It gives Uber users in those cities a powerful reason to consider using the service permanently instead of buying a car. Uber’s popular for sharing really interesting stats collected vis Uber rides with their social media fans.
Explore different areas in which you collect data and can turn them into interesting and engaging social media posts. Then, use them wisely.
Alternatively, you could conduct research on areas that interest your target audience and create graphs and insights that can assist them.

7. Brand mentions in media, articles etc.

“Trust is a key enabler for economic value creation,” says Philipp Kristian Diekhoner, a German entrepreneur from Singapore. And to build trust, you need to carefully design social media content that can support those goals. Brand mentions in trusted media and publications are an excellent way to build trust with the cross-section of your target audience and readers of that publication. You may also share interviews that your company’s executives participate in to establish the knowledge and expertise of your leadership and management.

It pays to mention the publication and author when they mention you, just to build relationships with journalists and publications in your industry. When creating your own blog and social media posts, you could feature these journalists and their work in turn. You could also make room for top industry websites, magazines and news agencies in your content to catch their attention.
Finally, you could design and promote PR stunts to get covered by various publications. However, ensure that it’s genuine and in tune with your brand. To celebrate Pride month, Tinder turned their office multicolored to support the Pride movement.

8. Behind the scenes content

With people as the face of your brand, your target audience is likely to connect with you more. Your target groups are also more likely to trust you when you transparently share the process or functioning of your business with them. That’s why it’s important for you to share behind the scenes content with your social media fans. So, what qualifies as behind the scenes content? A photo of you or your team at work, preparation for an event, preprocessing of your product, a photograph of your company at an offsite event are all great examples of behind the scenes content.

Here’s a particularly cute photograph of a company’s latest recruit, Piki, the so called VP of motivation. The best part about behind the scenes content is that it allows you room to share yours and your brand’s personality. So you can share whatever’s on your mind, unless it’s offensive to someone’s sentiments.
The more transparent and free-flowing your content is, the more likely your audience is to connect with it.
Note: This post will be updated to include more types of social media content for you to post for your startup. Please watch this space for more.

Feature image via Freepik.com 



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