Besides interacting with customers, filling in the social media stream for their brands and clients is one of the main responsibilities of the community manager/social media manager.
It’s their job to provide the community with interesting, useful and entertaining content. It’s the best way to give value to the audience and make them ha glad for following your profile.
Internet is huge. No human can read it all. And finding interesting things to share every day, or to fill every posting time can be a combination of search skills, using the right tools and some luck. One can spend hours and hours flocking from website to website, reading and selecting things that your audience may be interested. Some days you find way more content you need, others you can barely fill in two facebook posts. I think that every social media manager have been in this spot a few times in their work routine.
Here are 3 of the most common and maybe more efficient ways to find content to share through your social media streams.
1) Keyword search
Keyword search is the base of the content strategy. It’s kind of the “step one”. It passes through all the branding and content instances: website construction, SEO strategy, SEM campaigns, monitoring tactics, etc.
The process goes like this:
- Make a keyword list based on your services, products and interests of your company
- Search for these keywords in a regular basis in twitter, search engines, Google alerts
- Select and schedule the posts
This list may be complemented with topics that are into the domain of your business and your prospect’s businesses.
For example, intercom.io is a SaaS that helps other companies to monitor how people use their apps and communicate to their users. Their news feed, either on Facebook, or in their blog is not only about how people should use their product. They talk about customer service concepts, building products, problem solving, user experience, etc. As most of their clients are building new products, they offer these interesting resources and discussions. Besides crafting great content on these topics, they also share third party articles on their social media streams.
Problems:
Keyword searching is time-consuming and, for SEO reasons, you may always get the same results. You have to be hopping from one news search page, to a twitter search, etc., wasting a lot of time on the search process.
Of course, you can set Google Alerts for them, but managing these alerts is not always effective and may clutter your inbox.
2) RSS readers
After spending some time curating keywords, most people start to gather a list of reliable websites or website sections to follow.
That’s when you start to apply the content curation combo, that consists on:
- Browse the bunch of feeds in a RSS reader app, as Google Reader (RIP), Feedly, etc.
- Keep the best posts in a bookmark tool, like Pocket, Readability, etc.
- Schedule the posts of these contents in a Social Media Management tool, such as Buffer or Hootsuite.
The curator browse your RSSs, most times, grouped by themes, select the most interesting articles and then publish it in the social media streams. Some curators just skip step 2 and schedule the best posts directly on their Social Media Management tools or change the keeper for an excell spreadsheet, in some cases. More about this technique and how to do it in a more productive way, check this buffer blog post.
Problems:
Keeping the RSSs organized save time on searching, but most sites publish a wide variety of contents, and not all are about things you want to share. So, you have to spend some time browsing without a destiny and mining for the little pieces of treasure.
Another disadvantage is that you get trapped into a bubble, sharing things from the same set of sources, and making it hard to discover new ones that pop around internet all the time.
3) Content Curation Tools
There are several content marketing tools in the market that help you to discover, organize and share your content sources for your brand.
Most of them work similarly:
1. Enter a list of topics or keywords or select from a list of topics available
2. Their content engine start fetching contents and delivering it to you in a dashboard or timeline. Some of them even send you a weekly or daily digest.
3. You select and share these contents through your social media accounts (some of these tools share these contents automatically)
As some content curation tools works based on keywords, discovering new sources based on the relevance and “freshness” of the articles can be a real advantage. You can blow the filter bubble and get to know new opinions on your field or industry. Some of them, as Groupiest, allow you to add your RSS sources and have everything integrated.
Problems:
The automated-posting tools can be tricky. You may be sharing some articles you just want to monitor, and they are from your competitors.
Also, some of them only allows you to select from a list of predetermined topics, which is not specific and does not contribute on bursting the filter bubble.
Corporate-dedicated tools may be too expensive.
Conclusions
Finding good content to share is no easy task, especially if you keep in mind the 80/20 rule, and not bore your clients with “me, my products and my company” contents. The 80 part play a big role on how your brand is perceived and if your followers will keep following you.
A combination of the three techniques can be a good solution for delivering good content in a regular basis. In Groupiestwe gather the three of them in one platform to make the process a little less time consuming, with our big data powered search engine to help you discover more and more interesting stuff for your followers, clients and prospects.
And how about you, how do you find great content to share?
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