Jay Leonard
We knew it wouldn’t take long for Meg Hoppe’s most recent blog, sharing 50 ways to create original content, to spread like weeds during a long hot summer. If there is one consistent challenge our clients and followers face, it is creating the relevant content that is so vital to Inbound Marketing. Yet, original content is only one part of the equation.
When it comes to social media marketing, a key component of any Inbound Marketing Strategy, third-party content is an important part of what you share with your followers. For social media channels such as Twitter, third-party content should make up nearly 60 percent of what you share.
Here at Weidert Group, we follow a 6-3-1 rule for our daily social media sharing: 6 third-party links, 3 Weidert Group created links and one unique content offer.
So where do you get that third-party content?
There are a lot of sources you can use to obtain these important third-party links, from industry newsletters to e-mail to your company twitter stream. But the real trick is to be able to gather all these links without it taking up the majority of the day.
But we’ve learned some tricks, using tools we already use, that can shorten that process to under 30-minutes a day.
1. Use LinkedIn News
LinkedIn does a lot of great things. How many of you are aware it’s a great content aggregator? Hundreds of publications and specialty sites feed their news to LinkedIn, making it a great place to find and share third-party content.
Since you can follow news both by subject matter, and specific publication, it’s really easy to setup a news stream that provides information your followers and prospects would be interested in. While we wouldn’t recommend it as your only source of information, LinkedIn News can aggregate the majority of your content for sharing.
2. Use a scheduling app like Buffer
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you know we are fans of Buffer. What makes Buffer so useful is the ability to share content from any website with the click of an icon, rather than having to copy and past links into Twitter or any other app.
This comes in handy while working with LinkedIn News because we can open multiple in our web browser for content we want to share, then click on the buffer icon, write any comments and hit Add to Buffer. Buffer sends the links out at predetermined times. We can also select from multiple accounts as well. (We have a similar tool in the HubSpot CMS that we use for content from Weidert Group.)
3. Keep your queue full with Evernote
We are always looking for content our followers and prospects would be interested in, even when our outgoing queue is full. If we find something good, we want to make sure we save it – or curate it – so that we can share it in the future. Given the content demands of an effective social media marketing effort, what you need is a tool that allows you to save these content links without taking the time to copy and paste them somewhere else.
Evernote gives you a one-click solution.
By using Evernote, we can save the the URLs of interesting links and retrieve them when we are ready to send them out. We can also make notations – remind yourself why you saved it – or save entire web pages for future use. Clearly, it has applications well beyond social media, but it is a great way to curate content for future use. Once installed, it’s a simple one-click solution to save pages right from your browser.
By using these tools, we are able to greatly reduce the time spent collecting links to relevant content for social media sharing. These tools and tricks are by no means definitive, but are some of the ways we have found to do more in less time and still be effective.
Make sure you get the most from your social media accounts. Optimize your social media profiles with our Social Media Optimization Playbook.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
Learn how to publish your content on B2C
Join our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage
Add B2C to your Google News Feed
I have been using above two but never used Evernote for this purpose…I usually use Buffer to schedule updates and highly recommended for everyone..
I’m a huge Buffer fan as well. I recently switched to Evernote after the tool I was using was discontinued. I’ve found it a great way to curate items. I’ve found myself using it to keep a great stockpile of useful links. Thanks for reading and for taking the time to leave a comment.