When it comes to developing a social media strategy, it’s almost always best to combine content curation with content creation. Digital publishers who exclusively post their own articles, photos, and video on platforms like Facebook and Twitter aren’t realizing the full benefits of social media as a marketing tool.
Brands will often utilize social media curation techniques to bring more value to their Facebook and Twitter feeds. Digital publishers can do the same.
As a best practice, we recommend that publishers consider a mix of 65% created content and 35% curated content on their social media feeds. For the purposes of social media marketing, created content consists of articles, videos, photos, and other types of content that were developed specifically by the publication. Curated content is content that comes from outside sources, like local organizations and other news publishers.
Publishing content from outside sources strengthens your position as a thought leader in your niche. It also helps solidify relationships between publications. If a competing publication sees that you’re sharing its articles on Twitter and Facebook, that publication is likely to do the same for you. This sort of reciprocal relationship costs nothing, and it has significant value from a marketing perspective. It can also result in link building, and even potentially collaborations down the road.
The majority of digital publishers who practice social media curation are focusing on aggregation, or curating the most relevant content about their niche in a single feed. However, social media curation can also involve mashups, the merging of content about a topic to create an original point of view, and chronology, which involves putting together a timeline of information to show the evolution of a certain news story.
Well-curated social media feeds attract followers, too. Even though more and more people are getting their news from social media, most still don’t have time to follow every source. Digital publishers who use curation techniques to post the most important stories of the day are providing a value for their followers. That value will be rewarded with increased likes, shares, and follows.
How to Create a Curated Social Media Feed
Creating a curated social media feed takes a bit of trial and error. A publisher’s team should expect to spend some time each day filtering through interesting content online and sharing the best articles, videos, and photographs. It’s been said that the best social media feeds have a voice and a point of view, and curating content offers publishers an opportunity to develop that voice by pulling in articles from selected outside sources.
Social media curation is a smart move from a business and marketing perspective. So why aren’t more digital publishers using this technique?
Many publishers are under the mistaken belief that social media curation takes too much time or energy away from their traditional reporting tasks. That is true, to a certain extent. Social media curation does involve finding and aggregating the best content each day. When this task is done on a schedule, though, it can be streamlined. Certain social media tools and platforms can be helpful to publishers who are looking for ways to more seamlessly curate the right content on their feeds.
5 Reasons Publishers Should Practice Social Media Curation
- Posting curated content makes your feeds seem less promotional.
- Retweeting and sharing articles from other publishers helps generate goodwill.
- Curated content provides additional value for social media followers.
- Posting curated content positions the publication as a thought leader.
- Publishers who post content from outside sources see better results on Twitter and Facebook.
Promoting the best industry news, from your own website and other sources, is something that every publisher can start doing today. It doesn’t cost a time, and it will result in an increase in social media followers. If you’d like to learn more about best practices for using social media as a digital publisher, reach out to our team here at Web Publisher PRO.
