Content Curation Basics

I’ve had many people ask me about what is the right content to add to their blog or social media account. This depends on what they have in their marketing plan and what their goals are. (duh) But, once that is uncovered and being executed, the next question I get asked is what are content curation basics and the tools to go with them. This is a great question and what I have come up with works for me, so I thought I’d share it.

I do a lot of reading and want a place to save the links I find that I may want to pull from later, but know if it sits in my in basket, it will get lost or deleted. (Don’t pretend things don’t get lost in your in-box. When was the last time you deleted something anyway?) So I’m going to break this down into a few simple steps.

Social Bookmarking

I created a separate account on delicious.com to save my business links that I get in emails, off blogs, and any other source I may find. It’s a great way to organize and just keep a list of URLs you want a reference or use for content later, plus share them socially.

Another popular social bookmarking tool I use is digg.com to save useful information. Digg has also become a fairly decent RSS reader and you can search its list of submitted articles and add them to your saved bookmarks.

There are many other tools out there that will work as well, such as google bookmarks, reddit and more.

Curation tools

Another tool I use for organizing my media and article URLs is Storify.com. This allows me to post full stories and then use that link as a source for me to embed in various sources. It’s very easy to use and also a great way to keep an active record of content you have used. Again, there are many other tools out there, it is just that I have found this very useful.  I know quite a few people that use tumblr.com this way as well.

Posting Tools

The last section I’m going to go over is tools to help you post your links, articles and stories you’ve curated in a simple and easy to do way. Yes, you can do one post for Twitter, one for Facebook, another for Google+ and so on, but being efficient is key to keeping everyone organized and on time. My favorite tool for this is dlvr.it because of the may ways it can post information. It allows you to link several social media and blog tools to post at one time. It allows you to create a post in WordPress or right on the Dlvr.it website and push it out to all of your selected social media outlets at one time. I also use Hootsuite.com to do this, but Dlvr.it has a few more options. In both services, there is a free model and more advanced paid versions.

So the main thing is to remember to stay true to your marketing plans focus, use content that is worthy of being posted and has value for your customers, and be consistent. Otherwise your review of flappy birds by Larry Bird may never get found, by anyone, ever. Oh, the horror.