A surprising number of business owners have no idea what social media curation is, let alone what it does or how it can be used to benefit them online. In a nutshell, social media curation is the practice of reviewing, filtering and selecting high quality content for your target audience. Social media curation is ideal for businesses struggling to conjure up new material for blogs, looking to become an established voice in its industry or hoping to become more visible on social media sites. Below are 8 steps you can take towards an effective social media curation strategy but first, here are five tools to get you started.
SocialBro
This tool can be used to find out accurate information about your community in a bid to gain a greater insight into what makes your followers tick. You can tag followers and expand the information. SocialBro is mainly used with Twitter and allows you to see important analytics like your number of followers, recent unfollows and discovering when the best time to Tweet is. You get a free 15 day trial with the cheapest option, Premium, costing you $6.95 a month while the Business package costs you $149 a month.
TweetDeck
This is a Twitter creation and is an application designed for flexibility as well as promising you the ability to learn more about Twitter users. You can stay up to date with notification alerts for new Tweets, monitor and manage an unlimited amount of accounts and schedule your Tweets. It is possible to install the app on your iPhone and this service is free for Twitter users.
HootSuite
HootSuite is deemed to be one of the best social media management tools on the market. There are over 4 million users to date and it allows you to track mentions of your brand, analyse social media traffic and manage numerous social media profiles using Facebook, Twitter and more. You can pick a free plan with limited features or pay $9.99 a month for their Pro package which allows unlimited social profiles.
BufferApp
You can add pictures, videos and articles to your Buffer and these will be shared throughout the day. BufferApp works best with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and it also allow you to invite your entire team to speed up the process of sharing content with the world. The native apps available for Android and iPhone enable you to share on the move.
GroupTweet
Thanks to GroupTweet, it is possible to combine a multitude of contributors and create one mega Twitter account. Imagine having an army of 100,000 people constantly tweeting! Your business would constantly be at the front line with news and updates relating to your industry heard first from your company. This is a great way to ensure your company is seen as an industry leader. Although you will have a huge amount of contributors, you are still solely in charge when it comes to publishing the tweets. There is a free account but the Premium account for $4.99 a month includes message moderation, multiple hash tags, smart scheduling and more.
The 8 Step Program
- Start Scanning: Sign up for Google Reader and start following lots of blogs of allies and partner organizations. You should also sign up for Google Alerts to get news updates.
- Share Links: Be careful to only share links to corporate media articles relevant to your company/industry via the main social media networks Twitter and Facebook. It’s important to remember that more content can be posted on Twitter than Facebook it seems as users of the latter may see too many posts and decide these posts are getting in the way of news updates from friends.
- Don’t Post Entire Corporate Media Articles On Your Blog: It’s important to note that corporate media make tremendous amounts of money from web traffic so reposting blog posts in their entirety is a good way to anger important people.
- Use The Aforementioned Tools: HootSuite and TweetDeck are particularly useful when it comes to taking time out every day to read messages on your social media accounts.
- GroupTweet: It’s a great method of inviting members to share content so be sure to use it. Remember, you can have an incredible number of contributors.
- SocialBro: This is arguably the best tool to monitor existing followers as well as gaining new ones. Use the analytics to ruthlessly unfollow those who have already done it to you. In the Twittersphere, it is always important to have more followers than accounts you follow.
- Mix & Match Content: Although the written word is ever-popular, don’t be afraid to branch out in your curation attempts. Add blog posts that are video only, slideshows or even audio clips. This ensures that the content you post remains fresh and interesting.
- Add Short Titles: Industry experts suggest that titles with less than 120 characters are optimal. Short, catchy titles are easy to read and posts with snappy titles are more likely to be read and shared.
Use the tools and tips above to master social media curation. Remember, you are competing with a huge number of competitors so posting run of the mill content is not good enough. Keep social channels active and visitors interested in order to make the profit your endeavor deserves. If you use the tools mentioned above correctly, you won’t have to devote your entire existence to maintaining an online presence as much of the work will be done for you.
An article is written by Sara Carter. I like social networks, Google android, mac performance and psychology. I’m interested in IT services, computer upgrades, computer repair, different computer apps. Love traveling and skiing.