Content Curation: The Best Way To Achieve Brand Loyalty

• Updated on: 2019-04-25
• Read original article here

Let’s take a look at the current reality for marketers .
The number one challenge that marketers face is not having enough time and bandwidth to create content. The next biggest challenge is producing enough content volume followed by producing genuinely engaging content.
What do I feel about this? I believe, the pressure around content is going to keep piling on. But, the point is how do we save ourselves from this?
The answer is Content Curation.
But, before diving right into getting started with it, let us learn a little bit more about the topic. We should ask ourselves these questions:
What are the top content curation tools?
In this blog, we shall outline the real importance of content curation, and how brands out there should use it to build trust and brand loyalty. By the end of this blog, you’ll be able to curate content like a pro. Let’s take a look!
What is content curation?
How frequently we've seen a piece of content -- a blog post, a book or even a news article begin with a quote from other experts! This is an excellent example of Content Curation .
Content curation is finding and analyzing content and sharing the best (relevant and most interesting) pieces with your audience in a meaningful way.
It takes sharing to a much deeper level
Unlike content marketing, curation is not just about you. Instead, it involves researching and sharing content from other marketing experts whom your audience trust, and having your own perspective about it.
Doing this will add value to your brand, help you establish thought leadership and at most empower you to gain the trust of your audience.
As a brand, you need to curate content for your target audience without being mindless and mundane. We will talk about ways to efficiently curate content along the passage of the blog. But first, let us discuss in detail how content curation can help your business?
What are the key benefits to curating content for businesses?
Here are a few reasons why it makes sense to curate other's content on your social media accounts:
Building 2-way relationships with customers and influencers
Establish credibility as a thought leader
Curated content is a start to more in-depth and meaningful conversations
Saves you from being overly self-promotional!
Curated content supports your customers’ content needs
It's like a social contract
Sharing is a two-way street. If you share others’ content, they are more likely to share yours. Thus, find the writers and influencers you respect in your industry, curate their content and share it with your followers consistently to get some reciprocal sharing in return.
I've listed a few social media influencers whom I really adore as a marketer:
And obviously a lot more, you can find the never-ending list of the top social media marketing influencers here .
Establish yourself as a thought leader
Sharing useful content -- regardless of whether it's your own unique creation or something you've shared from other industry experts -- helps you become known as a thought leader in your industry. But,
“Simply curating the content and hitting the share button isn’t going to help you build an established brand in your space.”- Ross Hudgens, writes for CMI .
Clicking a share button isn't just enough to demonstrate your smarts.
Add a personal remark (summarize a key point or takeaway) to curated content and give your audience something to talk about. They will love these extra bits of knowledge.
Don't forget about CTAs! Make sure that the content you share have appropriate calls to action. Making them sign up for a newsletter, appear for a demo, download an asset, or click a link to another piece of content could be a few great CTAs.
For instance - Elan Marketing curates content from websites related to social media marketing. Rather than sticking to just using the plain title, they come up with their own blurbs summarizing a key point or takeaway to spice up the tweets.
Curated content is a start to more in-depth, meaningful conversations
You have added your remark demonstrating your expertise on a topic and shared it successfully with your audience. However, don't just post the link to the curated content and move on.
Keep in mind, one of the primary advantages of posting curated content on social media is utilizing content as a beginning stage for exciting discussions. Answer the comments on posts with additional insights and dependably remain available for answering the queries that people have. Doing this will help you build trust and keep the conversation flowing. This will further boost brand engagement over social media.
Curated content is not overly self-promotional
And that's a good thing. Brands that solely concentrate on marketing themselves aren’t winning on social media. Remember, social media is not just about you. It is about collaboration, connections, & information sharing and curated content help you achieve all these without much effort.
Content curation supports your customers’ content needs
You’re doing the work, you’re becoming the gatekeeper, and you’re saving your community's precious time; essentially everything your audience is looking out to do themselves. You are basically being a mediator between your audience and their content needs, need I say more?
With so many benefits to offer, content curation is a must. Ensure including it in your social media strategy to secure stronger first impressions, boost brand loyalty, and engage more frequently and efficiently with your audience.
Now that you know the advantages of content curation, you are ready to integrate it into your social media plan. Read on for more information on how to get started with content curation.
How to curate content for social media the right way
While most of us now understand how beneficial it could be to curate content; still many of us struggle in curating content the right way! It may seem to involve advanced science and strategy, but it’s actually quite simple!
We’ve broken down the process of content curation in seven simple steps.
Know your audience and the content they crave for
Your customer must always remain at the center of your every content curation effort. Remember, you’re curating content not only because you want to boost your brand loyalty or engagement but you also care for your audience, and you want them to do their job better.
So how do you determine the topics to share with your fans?
To decide on which posts to share, consider identifying your audience, speaking to them and understanding what their pain points are. You can start by asking yourself the right questions:
Who do we share the content with?
What are their informational needs?
Does our community consume information via social media, email or blogs?
Is the content relevant to our niche? Helpful to our audience? Or generally something of value?
Is the content from a reputable source? Is it high-quality?
Once you’re good on these, you need to decide the curated content ratio.
Decide how much content you want to curate
The second step is to come up with a content ratio of original and curated content. What would be the ideal ratio of curated vs. other types of content you would post on social media? What will work best for your audience?
There isn’t a single answer to these questions, but here are some popular ratios that have been tried and tested by brands and other social media marketers. Try these yourself for sharing content.
5-3-2 Ratio
5-3-2 content sharing ratio was structured and experimented by TA McCann from Gist.com, Let’s break it down:
5 should be the curated content
3 should be your original content
2 should be personal status updates
555+ ratio
60 percent curated
10 percent promotional
Practicing these Social Media content sharing ratios can facilitate your work in understanding the type of content you should curate. Again, these aren't universal; however, they can be altered according to your preference while you get to know what works best for you.
Categorize your content
Suppose you are a sports brand like Decathlon. Apart from content related to sports, you may also want to produce content related to a healthy mind, treks, and adventure.
While being focused on sports, how do you decide what other things to share that add depth?
Consider categorizing your content depending on your type of industry. Organize curated links across a consistent set of categories such as:
Long Reads, Good Reads, Interesting Reads
Fun, Games, Adventure and Entertainment
Economics, Politics, and Society
Just make sure, anything you curate across different categories is valuable to your audience.
Find your sources to discover great content
Once you've known how much you’re going to curate, and what you are going to share, the next step is to think from where you’re going to get the content you’re curating.
Curate content from a variety of sources otherwise you'll end up sharing the same content, which gets annoying. Also, the more you share content from different sources the more are your chances to build relationships with multiple content creators.
There are three most effective ways using which you can source content:
Re-share other's social media posts: The fastest and the most straightforward way to curate content for social media platforms is by merely hitting a Retweet on Twitter, Repin on Pinterest, or share button on Facebook. If in case you have an active community that loves to show their brand loyalty, why not shine some light on them by re-sharing their content?
Repurpose your own content: Curating doesn’t always have to mean sharing content from others. You can repurpose your best performing content and curate it in countless ways across different social media platforms. Create image snippets, smaller blogs, infographics or even videos that help you drive more traffic and engagement.
This will help you break down your content in smaller resources to keep your editorial calendars busy! Here's how we at Statusbrew repurposed content from one of our blogs - social media image sizes 2019 .
Statusbrew's content suggestion : Here’s an even better option to help you save time and streamline your content curation process.
You can use Statusbrew's Content Suggestions feature to get your personalized content repository to curate content. The great thing about Content Suggestions is you can filter content based on the feeds that you have added. Based on the days of the week, you can add specific sources and select only that content that fits your needs and the ones that your audience would be happy to share.
Here’s where you can start using this feature, or you can follow this video to know more about it!
Feedly, Quora, Learnist, Storify, Pocket are few other top content curation tools to help you with your marketing strategy.
Give credit to the creators
Because it’s a nice thing to do, and it feels good when someone gives credit, consider giving credit to the creators of the content you share.
First - Tag, link, and compliment them for their incredible work! Being respectful goes a long way. Grow that relationship.
Second - Always credit by adding a @ mention in a tweet. They’ll get notified, ideally reshare which helps reach a wider audience as well.
Luckily, with Statusbrew you can quickly mention Twitter profiles when creating a post. Just type @ and few characters, it will automatically list you all the Twitter handles matching the search.
Schedule it! Share it!
Planning everything will make your life easy. You can curate your content in advance, use a social media calendar to map out what you’re going to post and then use a social media scheduling tool to bulk schedule your posts . This will let your curations be seen over a balanced period and would keep your social activity alive. But don’t schedule too far in advance if you want your posts to be timely.
Note: As mentioned earlier, don't forget to add a personalized blurb summarizing a key point or takeaway to your curated content.
Engage and Analyze
Most of us often tend to skip these. We curate our posts, share them and never think about them again. Do not do this! Listen socially to the conversations, reply to the comments learn what’s working and what’s not working, and then tweak your strategy accordingly for better results.
Using Statusbrew , you can monitor all your social media conversations in real time from a single inbox. Just connect your social media profiles to Statusbrew account and start listening and replying to the conversations directly from within Statusbrew.
So you've engaged with your audience well, now it's time to cut through the noise on social and understand the real pulse of your audience. Dig deep into your social media analytics and look at which curated posts drive the most engagement. Then use that information to curate better content.
We've also created a detailed infographic on how to curate content like a pro.
TL;DR
Keep in mind, curating content doesn’t have to be a pain!
It's easy; all you need to do is understand your audience well, use the right tools and continuously analyze your results.
Statusbrew can help with your content curation for social media. Discover content to share, schedule it to publish on your social media channels, engage your audience and track your success—all from one dashboard. Start your free trial today !
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