As content creators, we share our content with our audience, but we share content from others as well. One of the biggest challenges we face is how to curate content for social media that they will want to engage with.
IE 254: How to Curate Content for Social Media with Benjamin Dell of Missinglettr
This is a sponsored podcast episode on behalf of Missinglettr. All opinions are my own.
Benjamin Dell is the founder of Missinglettr, a social media platform that helps content creators find the best ways to share their content on social media.
What Is Content Curation?
There are many buzzwords in the blogging world, and content curation is undoubtedly one of them. So I asked ben to define it for us.
Simply put, content curation is the sharing of knowledge with your audience.
There are many ways to think about curating content.
Perhaps you send out a newsletter to your email list, and you include relevant articles and links that your audience will find interesting. Or maybe you share links to articles, FB posts, or blog posts on your social media pages.
If done correctly, sharing this content leads your audience to see you as a trusted resource and a thought leader in your niche. It’s a great way to build engagement and connection with your audience.
Why Would You Want to Share Content from Others?
Back when I started my blog, there was a feeling of community among bloggers. We helped each other; we commented on each other’s blogs; we shared each other’s content.
However, there was a shift away from that “blogger neighborhood” sometime in the mid-2000s.
Blogging began to feel more competitive and were hesitant to share your content with their audience, and it became more about “me” than the community. There are excellent reasons for sharing content with your people, though.
First of all, the person sharing the knowledge is most often seen as the expert. If you share content with your audience that helps them solve their problems, they begin to trust you more and more, and you become the authority in their lives on that topic.
And with the sheer amount of information available today, the thought that your audience won’t look elsewhere for information is naive. You want to be the one providing them with the information they need.
Secondly, if you are in a tight niche, the more you curate and share other content, the less your people will have to go to someone else to get the answers to their questions.
How to Find the Best Content to Share
I feel like I can hear you all complaining right now about how much time it takes to find excellent content to share. So I asked Ben to share the best ways to curate content without spending precious hours doing so.
The first thing you have to know is your niche. Know what you want to share with your audience and feel confident in that.
And then, in addition to the topic-specific information you share, there are likely a few other sub-topics that your audience is also interested in. If you’re a gluten-free food blogger, your audience might also want to see vegan and gluten-free recipes.
You’re going to want to identify 2-3 other bloggers in that niche whose content you can share.
By choosing a couple of influencers in a tightly related niche, you have made your job of curation much more manageable. Likewise, you begin to build relationships with those influencers, and they will likely share your content with their audience if it’s a good fit.
Start small but intentional.
Creating the Perfect Images for Social Media
If you aren’t currently sharing content on social media, you need to do your research to find the exact image sizes for each platform. Those are easily found in a Google search.
Aside from sizing, though, there are other things to consider when creating images for social media.
The first thing to consider is your audience. While most recommendations are uniform across a platform, there are always tweaks you can make to stand out from the crowd. And your audience may expect different things than my audience. So it’s essential to know your people and what they like.
Secondly, don’t follow a set of rules that somebody else has said are the only way. Learn to trust yourself and to give your audience what they want.
Be willing to experiment. Try something, and if it works, great. If it doesn’t, or you want to try something else, do it.
How to Broaden Your Reach on Social Media
We all know that our reach has been cut drastically over the past few years. More and more, we have to “pay to play.”
“A single post is more likely not to be seen than to be seen.” ~Ben Dell
However, there are some things you can do to reach your audience with more of your content.
If you are using a scheduling tool, and you should be, take advantage of their ability to post for you at the time of day that will work best for your audience.
Keep in mind that timelines within social media are fast-paced. Things move quickly and change rapidly. People scroll without stopping unless something grabs their attention, and one way to grab their attention is with consistency and frequency.
Ben shared a great way to get your content in front of your audience. When you publish a new piece of content, create the social media posts that you will use to share it and set them up on a schedule – Ben suggests 12 months – to reshare that piece of content.
Missinglettr
Missinglettr’s primary offering is a social media scheduling tool that stands up against any other scheduling tool you may already be familiar with. Using this platform, you and your team can plan out an entire month’s worth of social media posts.
In addition, Missinglettr has two features that set them apart from the other scheduling tools.
Drip campaigns
The drip campaign is unique in its ability to take your new content, separate it into quotes, points, etc., and share those out to your audience. You don’t have to do anything except link your blog to your Missinglettr account, and they do the rest.
They will recommend hashtags, create branded imagery for you, and then take all the content and images and create a 12-month drip campaign for that single piece of content.
Literally, within minutes of publishing your post, Missinglettr has your campaign ready for you to review. You can change any aspect of what they create, even the length of the campaign, and when you’re satisfied with it, click “Go.”
Content Curation
Ben has given great reasons why curating content is necessary for bloggers and ways to make it easier. But the easiest way to do it is by using Missinglettr’s feature called Curate.
You begin by setting up your profile, meaning your categories, niche, topics, subtopics, etc. And based on all of that information, Missinglettr will recommend curated content that they think your audience will enjoy.
With just a couple of clicks, you can add any or all of them to your social media calendar, and they will automatically go out along with your content.
The fantastic thing is how Curate works to get your content in front of other audiences. You build your audience, much like you would for a FB ad, create the URL to the content you would like shared, and create individual posts for the different social media platforms.
With over 30K accounts in Missinglettr, you have a vast pool of content creators to connect with who will be anxious to share your content with their audiences.
If you need help with social media, if you’re exhausted from trying to be everywhere all the time, I encourage you to see what Ben and the team at Missinglettr have to offer. It might be exactly what you need.
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