One of the most common questions we hear from prospects and clients is:

How can you be effective with social media marketing while preventing it from being a major time sink?

To be honest, this is a daily challenge even for us. The fact of the matter is social media marketing is very labor intensive and difficult to scale. Between upfront strategic planning, creating unique content that genuinely helps and engages people, and constantly monitoring customer feedback, time management quickly becomes a struggle.

Creating a Content Curation System and Increasing Social Media Productivity

Having simultaneously managed social media for Strategexe and multiple clients, I’ve been pushed to find the most efficient ways to stay on top of social media.

Below is a description of how I find and organize content for social media updates, which you can easily use for your business!

Setting Up a Content Curation System

Content curation is simply the process of filtering through blogs, videos, case studies, and other online content and organizing it in a meaningful way.

So, for example, if you operated a landscaping and gardening business, content curation would have you searching for authoritative blogs that publish tutorials and tips on the topics of landscaping and gardening.

Finding Authoritative Sources

When I say “authoritative”, I’m referring to sources that have established loyal followings and credibility. For example, HGTV.com holds a lot of authority in the DIY home care niche.

One of the best ways to find high-quality blogs relevant to your industry is through a simple Google Blog Search. Since Google is in the business of indexing only the most authoritative content on the web, the majority of blogs in these search results will be the best of the best.

But let’s say you land on a blog you’re not sure is credible. How do you judge whether or not it’s a worthwhile source to pull content from?

  • Always measure the audience. Check the blog’s social media profiles and look at readers’ comments at the end of blog posts. If the audience is thriving, there’s a good chance the blog is worth keeping around.
  • Check for multiple authors. This isn’t a deal breaker by any means, but when a blog has more than one author, that means it’s well-established and other bloggers want to tap into that blog’s community.
  • More generally, what’s your impression of the website’s overall design? Most serious bloggers will invest in premium themes or custom designs, so if they’re putting money into their blog, they’re also likely putting a lot of effort into creating outstanding content.

Using Feedly to Organize Blog Subscriptions

As you start to gather these authority blogs, you’ll need a way to organize them. This is where a helpful tool called Feedly comes in.

Feedly is a content aggregator, meaning it allows you to take all these blogs and organize them into a central location rather than having to look for each individual blog every time you need new content.

If you used Google Reader in the past, Feedly is essentially the same concept, but with some added functionality.

Below is a screenshot of my Feedly. You’ll notice on the left I have separate folders for different topics and clients, allowing me to stay organized.

Organizing Blogs in Feedly

Rather than going directly to a blog to check for updates or find content, I can just open Feedly and all the content for blogs I’ve subscribed to is organized and freshly updated!

Renaming Blog Subscriptions to Twitter Handles

Let’s dive deeper into Feedly and how it can help increase productivity and success specifically with Twitter.

Renaming blog subscriptions to the blog’s Twitter handle is a tactic I’ve used for a while. See, one of the big keys to growing a Twitter presence is sharing other peoples’ content and giving them proper credit through a mention.

If we look at the typical anatomy of a tweet, we see:

[Post Title / Headline] + [Shortened Link] + [Mention Original Author] + [Hashtags]

The “via @TwitterHandle” seems unimportant, but it’s a critical component to building relationships on Twitter and growing your presence.

How can you make this process easy? Take a look at the screenshot below where I’ve expanded one of my Feedly folders on the left.

Notice that all of my blog subscriptions are renamed to the Twitter handle of that specific blog. So, as I’m going through the list of posts and see something I want to tweet, I can easily and always give a proper mention to the blog post author.

This is far more efficient than having to memorize or look up the Twitter handle for each blog and more effective than choosing not to give a proper mention.

Feedly Renaming Twitter Handles

Feedly Integration with Buffer and Hootsuite

One of the great features of Feedly is its integration with Buffer and Hootsuite, two popular social media management platforms that allow you to schedule social media updates and monitor your accounts.

When you expand a post within Feedly, you’ll see a series of sharing buttons.

Feedly Social Sharing Buttons

With these social sharing buttons, you can publish real-time updates or easily schedule updates using the Buffer or Hootsuite buttons, all from within Feedly.

Wrapping Things Up

As you can tell, Feedly serves as my command center for gathering and finding great content for social media updates.

There is quite a bit of up-front work with finding relevant blogs and renaming the subscriptions to Twitter handles, but once that’s complete, you’ll be far more efficient and effective in your social media marketing.