January 29, 2013April 18, 2015 by Mandy Edwards

Content Curation Tips to Get You Started

Today’s guest post is from a friend and fellow member of the Social Solutions Collective, Laurie Thompson.

Two of the biggest buzz words surrounding Social Media are “Content Curation”. I see those two words pop up in my Hootsuite dashboard almost every five minutes. What exactly does content curation mean, and should you be curating content?

Let’s start with a definition from Jennifer Hanford of B2B Inbound Online via her article Content Curation Sources for Online Media: “Content curation-the activity of sorting, collecting, and condensing content from all over the internet so you can share it with your target audience.”

There are plenty of content curation tools out there that can help you ease into obtaining information to share and hopefully start engaging with your customers!

Here are a few basic tools to help you get started:

–Google Alerts– Type in some key words that relate to your business field, decide what type of results you would like (blogs, books, everything, etc), how often you would like the results, how many results you would like, and where you want the results delivered!

–Google Reader-If you do not want all of your Google alerts coming to your email, you might consider having them sent to your Google Reader. In the reader you can set up folders to organize all of your content. Some of the folders I have are: Blogging, Curation, SEO, and WordPress. You can also subscribe to your favorite blogs using their RSS feeds, and pointing the feed to your Google Reader!

–Pinterest-Yes, Pinterest is a content curation tool! Every time you “pin” an item from the web, you are gathering content and putting it onto a content board! I curate Social Media Infographics on my Pinterest account. I have content boards such as Twitter Tweet Tweet, Linkedin Linky-loo, and YouTube Sees You. The only downside to Pinterest is when posting content from a board is you should thank the website/person you obtained the information from. This can be tricky when information is being pinned left and right, so be wary of that when using Pinterest for content curation.

Now I have just pointed out three content curation tools that are a great starting point, and only skim the surface. There is no right answer as to how you curate content, but you have to figure out what your customers want to hear from your business. Once you hit on the content that sparks an interest from your customers, then you are engaging in conversation and humanizing your company.

What content curation tools have you used? What tips do you have for content curation?

______________________________________________________________________________

Laurie Thompson is the ship’s captain at SiteMast, where WordPress and Social Media meet. She obtained SiteMast over a year ago, and is thrilled to keep SiteMast’s legacy going for the coming years. Originally, SiteMast dealt with WordPress only, but slowly and surely the boat is sailing into the busy waters of Social Media. Laurie’s goal is to help smaller companies dive into the WordPress and Social Media waters, and have a smooth sailing experience.