Why You Should Be Curating Content for Your Social Media Channels (And How To Do It)

15 Nov Why You Should Be Curating Content for Your Social Media Channels (And How To Do It)

Curating content can be an important part of any social media strategy. It will save you time, keep you consistent and more!. This week, we’ll review why you should curate content for your social media channels and how to do it.

What Do You Mean By Curate And Why Do It?

Curating your content means that you share content from other sources. You can curate blog posts, social shares, or even your visual content. Curating content is great when you need to fill content gaps, when you want to highlight user generated content, or even grabbing the attention of influencers you can reach out to in the future.

Curating content not only helps you when you don’t have any content of your own, but integrating curated content into your content schedule can help you connect with your audience by keeping consistency and positioning yourself as a thought leader within your industry.

How To Curate Content For Your Social Media Channels

1. Define Your Content & Aesthetic

The first step to simplifying the content curation process is to define your aesthetic and/or the content you are looking to share. This is important because it will help you narrow done the type of images (and other content) you are looking to share, and what types of images will fit within your feed. In turn this will help you narrow what sources these can come from. Now if you’re thinking “Dhariana, how the F do I choose my aesthetic?” give How To Create A Cohesive Instagram Theme a read.

2. Choose Sources

Once you’ve figured out what kind of content you’d like to share, or what your social media theme will be it’s time to choose sources. The most time consuming part of curating content is well, curating. The beauty of completing step 1 is that you’ll have a few go to sources for your content and images – you’ll know where to find what you need and this will free up time to find some spontaneous sources as well. While I do recommend having your go-to’s I also suggest you continuously keep an eye out for new sources so you’re not always reposting the same ones.

3. Get Organized & Create A Curated Content Bank

Getting organized is the next step in curating your content. This means gathering up all the images you want to repost or links you want to share in one place. Besides excel there are other tools you can use to get yourself together before the next step:

Use Twitter Lists: Twitter lists are a great way to keep track of resources, your favorite influencers , content creators or anyone who inspires you and matches your look and feel. Create Twitter lists for quick references when you need to curate content into your social schedule or feed.

Use Instagram Collections: Instagram collections are so great for keeping track of images you want to repost. To create a Collection save the image you like by clicking on the little bookmark icon to the right of the like heart. To view the photos you’ve saved, go to your own profile and click on the bookmark icon at the top which will bring you to your saved photos. Now to create a Collection click on the plus sign at the top right of this screen and the “New Collection” page will pop up. Once you name your collection you’ll see it under “Collections”. To add a photo you’ve saved to a Collection, click on the collection you want to add to, then hit the top 3 dots, then hit “add to collection” – this will bring up all your saved images and you can choose which images to add from there.

After you’ve taken the time to get organized I suggest creating a bank of your content and..

4. Plan Your Feed

Save time and get posts out of the way by planning out your feed and where your curated content will go. Planning out your feed (and getting posts scheduled out) will save you time and give you a chance to take a look at your social media feeds as a whole. This is especially important for visual networks such as Instagram. Use apps like Planoly, UNUM or Preview App to upload photos and make sure that everything looks good together – and shuffle around what you need to if things don’t look quite right.

Wether you need to fill in gaps in your content, elevate the look of your feed, establish yourself as a valuable resource, or just want to show followers a little love by featuring them, curating content can help bring your social media to the next level. Do you use content curation in your social media strategy?