It's the last Tuesday of the month, which means it's time for a new edition of the Social Strategy blog series. In the previous entry, we discussed how using images and GIFs in your posts can generate more engagement than just posting content alone.
By now, your Twitter feed is looking pretty good; you understand what you should look for, how to time your tweets, and how to get people's attention with them. However, as you're posting several times a day, you may be running out of your own content to share. As opposed to writing new content specifically to share, which is a losing battle no matter how you look at it, why not take advantage of what the internet already has to offer?
The concept of content curation has become popular in recent years, due to the success of services such as Netflix. You may wonder what a video streaming service has to do with your social media strategy, but Netflix has gone from a DVD-mailing company to one of the most well-known and respected brands in popular culture. Through a mix of creation – original programming, such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black – and curation – everything else that's offered on the service that Netflix didn't personally have a hand in producing – Netflix has established its service as the king of the streaming mountain despite an ever-growing number of competitors.
How can you apply the principles that have made Netflix so successful to your social media? By linking to relevant content that others have already created, you further establish yourself as a leader in your field without the work that can go into writing your own content from scratch. In recent years, the 5-3-2 principle has gained traction, which subdivides the content you share out of every ten tweets into three categories:
Five tweets are content relevant to your industry which are curated, or hand-picked. Doing so allows you to share insights from others in your field and join larger industry conversations. Curating also ensures that you offer a diverse set of opinions, leading to more engaging conversations. Medium, from Twitter co-creator Biz Stone, has become a popular network to use in content curation efforts, as there are a wide variety of posts on any given subject from regular people.
Three tweets are content that has been written by you or comes from your website. This may seem at odds with trying to advertise your business, but by offering your own content less frequently than you share the content of others, you are subtly raising its profile to the level of those whom you share content from.
Two tweets should be of a personal nature, or not at all related to your brand or business. People are on social media, more often than not, to have a good time, and nothing can kill a brand faster than every communication trying to advertise its products to people who just aren't interested. By doing something as benign as commenting on the weather, or sharing a video, you are allowing your audience to see the people behind the brand, and as such, are strengthening your relationship with them.
By adding content curation to your social media efforts, you ensure that people get far more value out of your communications than you yourself would be able to otherwise provide, and it also allows you to reach out to other experts in your field in an organic way. It allows you to spend time making your content is excellent rather than being pressured to keep up what may be an unsustainable rate of output.
SimplyCast can help you with your content curation efforts, not only with a blog full of posts tailored to specific industries but also through social media automation tools that can help you save even more time; schedule posts to go out as soon as you come across them, rather than scrambling to find a link to post after-the-fact. Click to sign up for a free 14-day trial and check back in two weeks for the next entry in this series.
