This month I’ve been focusing on social media scheduling and automation as a way to save time and allow for more engagement. A big part of scheduling in advance includes curating various articles and content from other sources.
Reading and sharing valuable and relevant information with your community can reinforce your message and help you provide education and encouragement. It’s important to be discerning about what videos and blog posts you choose to share as this can help you continue to build trust and establish authority in your niche.
So how do you go about setting up a system to make it easier to find awesome content to post? I’m glad you asked!
There are several places where you can access and categorize meaningful and entertaining “stuff” to share, but it’s really useful to be able to read and organize posts from top experts and thought-leaders in your niche in one place.
Tools for Content Curation
This happens to be a site that I use and it’s FREE! You can search for a variety of different topics, magazines, and authors. The latest posts will show up at the top of your feed to scan when you’re ready to comb through and read interesting articles. You can even organize content into folders. This is such a time-saver! There are also integrations and other perks for a small monthly fee if you wish to streamline your curation process even further!
This tool can be useful to, well, make lists of content on the internet that you want to save and share. Listly offers a Chrome extension to make it easy to save blog posts and videos as a Listly list. Others can also contribute content and the list can be shared via social media or embedded into blog posts. This can be a great way to categorize your favorite articles for different topics and reference them at a later time.
IFTTT stands for If This Then That. There are a TON of “recipes” to choose from on this site/mobile app. Several are helpful in regards to simplifying social media and making productivity easier. IFTTT recipes can help you automate several different processes. I currently like to use it to share my Instagram photos on Twitter, so every time I post a new image on Instagram it automatically shows up on the feed instead of just a text link.
You can also do cool things like save photos that you’re tagged in on Facebook to your phone or automatically add screenshots to a Dropbox folder without doing a thing. It’s so neat to check out all the different possibilities and think how a step or two can save some precious time!
This app lets you save articles, videos, and other content to check out at a later time. It’s perfect for when something catches your attention but you don’t have time to dive in or finish it. You can save posts while browsing with an extension or via email. Pocket is also integrated with several mobile apps. You can even use IFTTT to automatically transfer a saved article on Feedly to Pocket!
News app on iPhone
I love that this news feed can be easily customized with different topics of interest like social media, marketing, and music. When I have a few minutes to spare while waiting, I like to scroll through and save articles that I think are worth sharing on Twitter and Facebook. I’m even able to send them straight to Buffer app, my favorite social media scheduling tool, to post at a later time!
Other Curation Suggestions from The Art of Social Media by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick:
- Alltop
- Google Scholar
- Klout
- NPR
- SmartBrief
- TED
- Stumble Upon
- Trending on Facebook
- Popular pins on Pinterest
What’s your favorite way to find valuable content? What resource(s) do you plan to check out?
For more ways to maximize your social media presence and simplify your strategy, get my FREE Streamline your Social Quick-Start Guide!