By Vasudha Veeranna
From a business point-of-view, social media is the marketer’s messiah. It lets you reach out to audiences at scale and helps put your brand’s message out there quickly and effectively at little, or no, cost.
It makes your business interactive and gives you an opportunity to understand your audiences’ needs and tailor your offerings, content curation, and sharing accordingly.
And while social media can be extremely rewarding for a business, it can also be a tad bit frustrating. With everything in the social world moving so quickly, it’s not always easy to be effective, especially if you don’t have a sound content curation and sharing strategy.
Content Curation for Different Types of Content
Planning your content is not just about scheduling posts in advance.
You also have to decide on the content curation mix and type of posts you’d like to publish on your social accounts.
There’s really no specific classification for the “types of content” you could share, but going by the nature of the message, or the objective behind the post, the taxonomy of social content would include three categories: Promotional, informational, or spontaneous.
Promotional Content
Unless you’ve mastered epic levels of subtlety, one look at your post, and your followers will know you’re trying to sell them something.
Promotional content typically comes with a link to a landing page, which (ideally) has a strong call-to-action. It’s the type of content that echoes your marketing goals.
Promotional content is important—after all, one of the basic objectives of setting up a business page is to promote the business.
However, every good marketer knows not to bombard your audience with too many promotional posts. You’ll only end up annoying them, and so much they may decide to stop following you.
Informational Content Curation
Here’s a golden rule for content curation—be it on social media or elsewhere—content that delivers value attracts greater engagement.
And while your own content creation of information content is important, it is also valuable to supplement your original content with information and educational content curation strategies to ensure you’re sharing frequently enough to attract and retain the attention of your followers.
Using content discovery tools can help you save a significant amount of time and effort on coming up with ideas for your social media posts.
Other tools such as Newsle help you find content published by influencers in your niche.
Spontaneous Content
Allowing scope for spontaneity in your social media content curation schedule is a great way to encourage those outbursts of creativity that you may sometimes experience.
Visual content tools such as Canva are of great use if you simply want to quickly create a pin for your Pinterest board or even a meme for Facebook.
A flexible schedule also ensures there’s room to accommodate a trending news article relevant to your industry or a rumor that has been going viral.
Experiment with these content curation strategies and different content type mixes and determine what works (and what doesn’t) for your business.
What other tools or strategies do you find most helpful?
image credit: Gonzalo Aragon