Now that you have picked the specific sub-niche that you’re going to be targeting as well as finished doing advanced research on where your sub-niche or niche segment audiences are located on social media platforms, the next step is to find content. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you stand to save a lot of money. The bad news is that you need to put in a lot more time and pay attention to details. There are no two ways about it. You cannot drop the ball when it comes to the quality of the content that you are going to be sharing on your social media accounts. Each and every piece of content you share must build your brand. This is non negotiable. You can’t just pick random pieces of content that somehow, some way, has something to do with your niche. That’s not going to help you get the right eyeballs. That’s not going to help you establish the kind of credibility and authority you need to eventually convert highly specific and qualified traffic from social media into cold, hard cash.
What is Content Curation?
As I’ve mentioned above, you stand to save a lot of money with content curation. This should be obvious. After all, you’re not going to be using the content that you yourself created. Content curation is all about picking other people’s content and sharing those materials on your social media accounts. This creates a win-win situation. Since you’re sharing links and descriptions of such content, the creator of that content gets free traffic. You, on the other hand, get to build up your credibility because people are rewarded for following your accounts with highly targeted, highly specific, value added content. Everybody wins. The user wins, you win, and of course, the original content creator comes out ahead. This is how it’s supposed to work. You win big time because you save a tremendous amount of money not having to create a huge amount of original content. If you’ve ever tried to write your own stuff or outsourced content creation, whether in the US or to other parts of the world, it can get quite expensive very quickly. Content curation enables you to build credibility with your audience in a very inexpensive way. You use other people’s content. You get to entertain them, build credibility, and gain their trust. The downside here is the time. Sure, you’re not spending greenbacks, but you’re definitely going to be spending time. As I’ve mentioned above, you cannot be indiscriminate when you are trying to do content curation. Whatever goodwill you have built up for your brand will go up in smoke if people catch on to the fact that you are just randomly curating and spreading low quality content that may have something to do with your niche. That’s not going to cut it. Not by a long shot.
Adopt the Right Content Curation Strategy
Now that you know where your target audience members are on social media platforms, you build credibility by populating your social media accounts with highly credible, high authority third party content. This is called curation. In between those materials, you are going to be sharing your own original content. From time to time, you’re going to call people to action to take a look at the incentives you’re giving away for them to join your mailing list. This is how you play the game. When people follow you, they are rewarded with top notch content. It doesn’t really matter whether you produced that material or it was written by somebody else, your followers get rewarded for following your account. They get niche-specific material. Eventually, you build trust with them because you only send them the very best materials. They start paying attention to your own materials. More importantly, they start noticing the content you share, which actively encourages them to sign up to your mailing list. This is the key. You intersperse your own original content. You create an impression of quality in their minds because you’re sending only the very best third party content. You then mix in your own original content which is of the same quality as the other stuff you’re sending. Eventually, they warm up to your brand, and this is where your call to action content comes in. You call them to action regarding the freebies you’re giving away. Maybe you’re giving away software, a booklet, discount codes, or even a full blown book, it doesn’t matter. You are ethically bribing them to enter their email addresses so they can download the incentive. That’s how you build up your mailing list. On top of all of this, when people join your mailing list, you call them to action to share the emails that you’re sending them. Maybe you should ask them to forward that email to their friends. Maybe you would want them to copy and paste the material and post it on their Facebook wall.
The Best Part
The best part to content curation isthat it’s very easy to automate. Seriously. This is one way of content promotion that is very automation friendly. You only need to get the URLs of the third party content that you’re curating and plug them into an Excel sheet. You then convert the file into a CSV file, which is then imported by social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite and SocialOomph. You don’t have to manually enter everything. You don’t have to schedule everything by hand. You can do all of this through software. Isn’t that awesome? You get to build credibility while at the same time minimizing work. Now, with that said, you need to pay special attention to content quality.
High Attention to Detail is the Key
You have to resist the temptation of running basic keyword searches on Google or on social media platforms and grabbing anything that is somewhat related to your niche. That is a one way ticket to brand destruction. You worked hard to build your social media brand, it really would be a shame to see all of that go up in smoke because the content you’re curating is very unpredictable when it comes to quality. There may be several days where you’re sending the very best, cutting edge reports on your niche, followed by a few days of just completely worthless content. What do you think prospective fans would think? Either they would think that your brand is unreliable or you’re unprofessional. Whatever the case may be, you’re not going to be convincing people that your brand focuses on the very best in your niche. You need to be very discriminating when you select your content. You have to read through the materials. Make sure that the content is alive, updated and well-written. This, of course, takes time. The trade-off, obviously, is that you don’t have to spend money. Regardless, you need to pay close attention to the content that you’re sharing because it represents your brand. The quality it contains either makes your brand look good or erodes your brand. It’s your choice.
Anna
