15 Content Tools To Grow Your Social Presence

 

Why You Need to do Content Curation

If you’re not reading every week about what’s going on in your industry then let me be the first to slap you on the hand and say, “Shame on you.” There’s nothing better to help you grow your business than to stay on top of the latest news and industry trends.

How can you give your customers the best product or programs if you don’t know what’s new and how this information can help them?

For you to grow your social presence, you really need to think about how you can schedule 15 – 20 minutes pockets of time into your day to do some research online about what’s going on with your industry.

And let me stop you before you start to make excuses – there’s a good chance that you’re already doing this. Every time you read a post from your favorite blogger’s newsletter or click on a link about how to use social media that you found on Facebook, you were actually doing some research reading.

Now that you realize that you’ve been ‘sort-of doing this’ but didn’t realize how it could help you grow your social presence, think about how you can turn this idea into a weekly practice of research reading.

The more you know, the more you can answer questions, the more you can participate in your Facebook groups when someone has a problem and the more you can provide great information for all the people following you.

But just reading all this stuff isn’t the way you’re going to grow your social sites. You need to setup a way to collect all of these great articles you found so you can use them as reference or share them in your social posts.

You need to figure out a way to curate all that content.

If you’re not familiar with the phrase Content Curation, here’s what this means:

Content curation is a term used to include all management activities related to the organization and integration of content collected from various sources that includes the name of the publication and a link to the content. Curation is the organization and maintaining the collection of this content for you to re-purpose for your social sites.

How Does Content Curation Grow Your Social Sites

Seriously, there’s no way that anyone can run a business and spend all their time creating content to post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and throwing up a few pictures on Instagram. It’s just not physically possible to do all that work which is why it’s so important to find quality content that you can share with your fans.

Your goal is to share valuable content that will help your followers make their life easier, help them do something quicker or solve a problem they’ve thinking about for awhile. This is the stuff that brings your fans to actively click over to check your Facebook fan page or Twitter feed.

When you collect your shareable content, ask yourself these questions:

• Are the points in this post important to how you run your business?
• Is this post written from a different point of view or the same as yours?
• Have you tried out these tips, the apps or whatever else the post is telling people to try/do/download?
• Is this a topic your fans would want to know more about?

The idea is to do more than just grab links and post them on your social sites. It’s about taking the time to share links that will help you help others.

Content Curation Tools

You should be able to find at least 10 – 15 articles to read every week. If you haven’t been able to find that many articles, you’ll need to open up your research time a bit more and search for more content.

If you need to find more content to read every week, look for bloggers in your industry that you can follow and find their best posts. Try to add more key words to your online search to find more posts to add to your article collection.

So now you’ve found all that great stuff to read, how do you collect { curate } it so you can re-purpose those links to share with your social sites?

Years ago, the easiest way to collect your articles was to email the links to yourself or set up a folder in your computer with category-named Word documents containing the article links. But that just takes up way too much space and who needs to deal with all those emails in your inbox?

Now we have a whole bunch of programs out there to help you collect your content.

Remember, your goal is to save time so the idea here is to make collecting all that research an easy step and not adding extra work to your day. Here’s is a list of great options to keep your content in one place:

Pinterest: This is the program that I use all the time! Not only does using Pinterest give me a place to house all my content but adding all these great posts to my boards help me grow my Pinterest account.  Save (pin) your articles to specific categorized boards.

Evernote: Save your articles to Evernote’s workbooks; this program allows you to customize the name of your workbooks so your articles can be saved into different categories.

Pocket: You can save articles, videos or whatever else you want to keep directly from your browser in your laptop or from apps like Twitter or Flipboard. And once you save something into Pocket, it’s always in there and you don’t need wifi to view it.

Scoop it: Not only can you save your content to your Scoop it account, they’ll give you suggestions to read other content you might be interested in learning more about. The program also allows you to share this great stuff that you found to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Feedly: Like the other options I shared with you, Feedly can help you collect your articles and videos into one place. This program has a clean, easy to use dashboard that allows you to set up feeds { categories } into collections to help you easily search for what you’re looking for.

Storify: Create stories from the posts that you’ve found and save them into different categories or stories. Users can browse and set up your posts in a tradional storyteller or blog format.

Juxtapost: Keep track of your content with this easy-to-use tool to “bookmark” content into categorized boards that look like pinboards on Pinterest. Juxtapost is a powerful content curation tool to help you follow the top leaders in your members industry.

Learnist: This content tool is more than just a place to save your links. Learnist is a collection program for organizing text, images, video and audio.

Triberr: Remember when Triberr was the place to go to grow your blog traffic? Well, the social program is still around for you to connect with other bloggers and find great content to share. Just join a tribe and start curating content!

Flipboard: This social tool is set up just like an online magazine. You can save content to Flipboard or follow their topics and create separate magazines within your account based on different categories.

Paper.li: This program is more than just a content curation tool. Not only can you collect your content in an online newspaper format, Paper.li allows you to share your content to your social media sites.

Listly: If you’re all about making lists, this is the tool for you! Turn your curated content into different lists that you can categorize in any order that you want to help you collect and later re-purpose your posts.

Delicious: This easy to use content curation tool collects your content and allows you to highlight selected content from anywhere online. Delicious’ bookmarklet lets you quickly add links from any web page.

BuzzSumo: This curation tool offers what they call, “content marketing intelligence.” BuzzSumo actually analyzes the content and lets you know which posts perform best and then helps you curate the top trending information for your fans.

Twitter lists: A Twitter list is just a curated group of Twitter users that you can follow. You can create lists for different categories and add relevant Twitter users into the specific list. Then when you log into Twitter and view your lists, you’ll see all their latest posts in one place.

 

 

PS If you’re looking for more tips to help you manage your social marketing, download your FREE copy of my 10 Social Media Time Management Strategies ebook. You’ll learn some easy to follow strategies to help you create a social media routine that works with your crazy busy world.