Gathering all of the content you need from your website and posting it throughout the day on each social media channel can be a daunting task. Rather than scare you, I’d like to offer you a simple and effective solution: curation.
As a social media professional, you’re already curating a collection of resources or content to share in each of your social media channels every day. Curation is generally defined as selecting or organizing items in a collection or exhibition. The ability to curate great content that your audience wants is a top skill in social media. There are two types of curation, the first is deep diving into your own content vault for resources to share. However, in social media terms, we sometimes refer to curation as selecting high-quality resources that your brand does not directly create. This is content created by other brands, influencers, and social media users.
Throughout my decades working with brands, I’ve encountered some hesitation from brands to curate resources created by other brands. Not one reason they have presented has ever changed my mind about the powerful effects of adding curation of others’ resources to your social media strategy.
Here are seven powerful reasons why I think you should absolutely include curated resources in your social media programming.
1. Curation can significantly increase your overall reach and engagement.
Engagement is a signal that your audience values the content. Typically, the more engagement you have on your posts, the more reach your posts will receive. By selecting the best resources that you know your audience will find valuable, you are increasing the ways your audience can engage and start to form a connection with your brand.
2. Curation can help you provide value in a consistent way.
Above all, always lead with the value you can provide to your audience. By sharing resources that your audience values every day can over time also build trust with your audience. This is one of the most powerful impacts of curation. I’ve seen educators trust and recommend brands solely because of the value they provide (and not their product or service!). Let that sink in for a second.
3. Curation can increase your cadence of social media posts.
To be competitive on social media, you must be consistent and depending on the social media channel, you’ll need to craft many posts throughout the day. (Make sure to download our infographic that outlines the minimum, ideal, and maximum posting frequency to aim for on each channel.) Unless you’re a media company that produces content as on the regular, you do not have the capacity to create the quantity of content that social media requires. Fill that void with curated content your audience values.
4. Curation saves you time and money.
Creating content from scratch takes a lot of time and can be a very costly endeavor. It also takes skill that you may not have internally (and finding the right writers can also be challenging!). Curating content from other sources is a powerful way to decrease your need for you to create everything by scratch. I know sometimes we have the tendency to reinvent the wheel (especially in education). If there’s already a fantastic resource out there, this is the permission you need to not recreate it -- just share it.
5. Curation allows you to elevate diverse voices within your industry and topic.
In education specifically, it’s incredibly important to listen and to elevate educator voices. You can do this easily by sharing what they say and create. And a friendly reminder, please don’t forget the word “social” in social media. No one wants to hear anyone solely talk about themselves and only share things about themselves.
6. Curation adds depth to your content strategy.
Given that creating your own content is costly and time consuming, you’ll need to make choices on what you can and cannot simply create. Adding curated resources allows your brand to cover more topics and inject more content types into your overall social media programming strategy. In addition to depth, you can also make your content more accessible by providing as many types of content as possible.
7. Curation can help you form a fanbase that consistently promotes and engages with your posts.
All tides rise together. When you promote others, they will be more inclined to promote your posts as well. The more you do this with many people and brands, the bigger the size of the group you will form that can help regularly share and engage with your posts. If you’d like to do this in a more formal way, you can establish promotional partnerships with a select group.
This all sounds good in theory but does adding curating resources into your social media feeds actually work? I can tell you that injecting popular and on-brand content into your social feeds that is not created by your brand can significantly increase your reach and engagement. We personally grew one education brand’s Facebook engagements over 300% year-over-year just by simply adding curated resources.
If adding curated content is a bit of a stretch for your organization to start, you can dip your toe in the water by just promoting resources from sources that you think consistently produce high-quality content. You can then analyze the performance of that content and then slowly add more sources that you can curate from in a data-informed way. If you’re more hesitant about curated resources, you can also just curate resources of people that mention your organization or product. This is not ideal but you have to start somewhere.
The last thing I’ll leave you with (and it’s a bit of a mic drop): Your audience doesn’t care where the content you share comes from. They just care if it’s helpful to them.
