Content Rules
There are two aspects to social media… One is people sharing their experiences, likes, dislikes etc. The second is content. People need something to talk about and your product or service is the goal. In order for social media to be successful, you need to have something for people who want to talk about your company to link to.
Example:
Someone might want to share on their Twitter page how much they enjoy a Five Guys meal. This could easily prompt a discussion on Twitter with people sharing their experiences, taking pictures of their meals, etc. Eventually, someone is going to go visit the Five Guys website. Having an online menu, deals to link to, and the ability to order online helps prompt a consumer to make a purchase. By having the ability to communicate with its audience and the right features available on their website – Five Guys was able to convert a purchase.
There’s more to it
Creating a blog (or communication hub) is very easy and inexpensive. Creating a blog that will work well with social media is not. To optimize your success on social media sites, your blog will need a social friendly design.
Above all, your blog design should incorporate your brand. Your company brand and quality products are what separate you from the competition. By creating a user friendly design integrated with social media options, you can assist your audience in sharing your content.
A good looking design does not have to be expensive. Depending on how the site is updated, there are many inexpensive templates or themes that can be used and customized to complement your company brand. When considering designs, it will be more effective to present a professional looking site over a “cool” looking site over the long-term. What’s considered cool today could change tomorrow as trends change.
Give careful consideration to which employees you want updating the site and think carefully about what information should be made public. Having a manual or guidelines for employees to follow will aid in keeping the blog or news site focused in the right direction.
Only publish quality content that will benefit your audience. Be thorough when writing your content, if the goal is to promote a special – make sure all of the information the customer needs is included in the post.
Example:
Be sure to include what comes with the promotion, cost/price, limitations, etc. and don’t forget to include contact information in case anyone has questions. If the content you’re creating is an article, make sure sources are linked (and working), the information is accurate, and always take time to edit the post for proper grammar and spelling.
If social media users think you are creating content made for only for social websites (link bait) they may not ‘positively’ share your content.
Each article or news item should have:
- Introductory paragraph – Start with compelling introductory paragraph.
- Details – The more thorough your content is, the better. Do not lengthen the content by adding fluff.
- Facts – Make sure you have data that backs up the points you are trying to make. Link to the sources of your data.
- Images (Pictures, Infographics, Video) – Use images appropriately. Do not use an image that has nothing to do with the content to trick the user into viewing the content. Do not think the pictures are a substitute for content; unless the focal point of the content are the pictures. Example: Photography. Ensure the pictures complement the content and do not dominate it. If you’re having problems finding photography to use, read through this quick guide by Kim Garst – 10 Simple Ways to Find Images.
Standing out – Headlines that attract attention
As you browse social media sites, pay attention to the headlines. Do you notice how your attention is drawn to one title over another? A good title can make the difference in whether someone clicks over to read the content or not. Coming up with good titles is not as easy as it seems. It is common for writers to read an article and spend more time thinking of a title than they did creating the entire article.
Practice makes perfect so start practicing. Come up with 10 topic ideas that you think will do well with your audience. Your titles need to:
- Be catchy – Copyblogger has some excellent advice that will help you come up with creative headlines. Put your original spin on their hints and tips. Do not copy because, although good tips, they have been copied endlessly. Use them as a starting point and make them your own.
- Don’t be cheesy – Lists and how-to guides work well, but only if they are done right. For example, do not try to use common list numbers such as 10. Try to use less, numbers like “51.” Ensure the list has substance and there is a validation as to why you’ve included an item on the list.
- Be creative – You do not want to trick your audience into clicking you content. Use headlines that makes them “want” to click – something that they want to know the answer to or enough information to leave them wanting more. Stay away from questions that have yes or no answers. Lastly, do not use headlines that your audience knows the answer to. If the person can answer the question, they will most likely not click on it.
Once you have created your 10 headlines, eliminate the mediocre ones and pick up the most promising one from the remaining titles. Compare this title to titles you’ve used on content you currently have. Do you see a difference? Is there a need for improvement? Try writing content for your newly created title. This will help determine which method works best for you – writing the content first then coming up with the title or creating the title first, then writing the content to match.
Keeping up with demand
As you can imagine, creating all of the necessary content is time-consuming and can get very expensive. You need a simpler solution and this is where content curation comes in. With the right strategy and the right tools, you can deliver content that your audience wants and search engines love… in half of the time.
What’s content curation?
Content curation is the process of hand selecting content created by other sources and sharing it with your audience. Imagine the Internet is as wide and deep is the Pacific Ocean – filled with letters, words, images, music, videos, games, information, spam, bacon, and everything else you can think of. All of this content waiting for your attention and yet you don’t know where to start or which to choose. With so many choices, you often end up with nothing. What if someone filtered out all of the irrelevant stuff and presented you with the content you are interested in most? Wouldn’t that be convenient? This process of sorting through the vast majority of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful way is called content curation.
Five types of content curators
1. Chronology – This type of curation posts information in a historical timeline of events. The Center for Rights created a timeline of SOPA and PIPA, explaining how these laws went from being inevitable to being mass protected by Internet organizations, web companies and consumers.
2. Elevation – This curator will create a post from the dailies and ongoing research of a particular subject, giving you new insight. In other words, it will elevate your understanding of that subject. This is easily the most original type of contact curation.
3. Aggregation – Consists in curating the most relevant content about a topic into one single location. This is the most common way of curating content, and it is at the base of the majority of the content curation services actually present online.
4. Mashups – This content curator blends several different and pieces of content together to create something original. While most people think of music mash ups, there are endless variations you can create:
- Business mashups – these are created out of a combination of data, applications and outside Web services.
- Consumer mashups – these take data from multiple sources and combine them into a single source.
- Infographics are mashups compiled from multiple data sources and then turned into a visual.
- A mashup could be as simple as a compilation of interviews you perform with experts in your field.
5. Distillation – This content curator is looking for a way to clear the fog on a certain topic and give readers the essence of the story. If you’re going to use this method of cure ration, you will need to present your topics core idea, and publish a clear case of what’s going on. Be sure to include credible sources and only deliver the best content regarding the event.
Curation Do’s & Don’ts
Do’s
- Curate content for your audience – not search engines
- Be selective about your content
- Add feeds to Google blog search index
- Post curated content to Google+
- Annotate curated posts with your own insights
- Re-title all curated posts
- Prominently link back to the original article
Don’ts
- Repost the full text of articles you’re curating
- Curate from a single source over and over again
- Share duplicate full size images
- Use “nofollow” links
- Open links in new tabs
Content curation tools
Use these tools to capture the basic ideas when you’re searching for content to curate:
- Jing – One of the best tools out there for grabbing screenshots is Jing. It’s a free tool that works on both Macs and PCs. It’s a simple download that allows you to capture and crop whatever is on your screen. You can also add arrows, boxes or texts and then save it as a .png file.
- Gimp – Sometimes you’ll need to blur out sensitive information on your screenshots or do other modifications. This is where a free photo-editing tool like Gimp comes in handy.
- Feedly– This is free web-based app is a super-charged RSS reader that allows you to easily organize content you find online into a single, clean layout.
- Evernote – This is probably a no-brainer for a lot of people, but it is so awesome and such an essential tool for any blogger, I have to mention it. Evernote is a must-have for anybody who is keeping a pulse on what is trending and wants to archive it for future use. You can save an entire page, just the article, a portion of the article or just the URL. Create notebooks to organize all of your content around specific topics. And it’s free.
- Paint.net – Another free image and photo image editing program for PCs. Comparable to PhotoShop, Paint Shop Pro, and GIMP.
- Storify – Storify is a content platform that allows you to pull in the best content from the web around a particular topic from the sources like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, SoundCloud and Disqus. It then makes it really easy to embed on WordPress, Tumblr of Posterous. In addition, if you are using MailChimp, then you can email your subscribers directly.
- Scoop.It – You can create the best-looking layout of your curated content when you use Scoop.it. In fact, it’s almost like your content is rendered in a glossy and engaging magazine format. This content is then easily shared on social networks, and like many of the other tools I’ve mentioned above, Scoop.it allows you to embed this content on your blog so that you can promote it.
- Curata – This paid platform will help you quickly find content relevant to your audience. Users can fine-tune, customize, and categorize content sources for review and then disseminate from one place. The publishing and promotion options allow you to repurpose curated content across your blog, social, newsletter, and automated marketing platforms.
- PublishThis – This paid platform employs “Rich Content Intelligence (IQ)” allowing for quicker content discovery based on relevance and content trends, keyword searching, “Mention” mis-matches and “Learning” tools to find and organize curated content quicker. The platform integrates with web, email, social, and marketing automation and their API interface will allow the software to scale to with your demand.
Remember, it will take some practice to curate the right content for your audience and then organize it in such a way that people link to it and share it. I recommend you sign up for one or two curation platforms now, follow a few of the most popular curators and then create a post or two of your own. You need every advantage you can get, and content curation can give you that advantage.
If you’re ready to ramp up, here is an excellent list of curation resources, Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List, put together by Meg Sutton. Now only is the article a great resource, read the comments to find even more tools!
Six reasons to curate content
1. Discover great content – The process of searching for content will expose you to a tremendous amount of great ideas. Some of these you could turn into relevant posts, while others are ideas you can apply to your business. I’ve often found excellent content by researching for a project. In a lot of ways discovery is replacing search.
2. Increase inbound links to your site – Naturally, when you are publishing curated content, you will link out to the original source of each piece of information. That link will notify the author and draw his or her attention to your post, they may then link back to you and share your content with their audience via a blog, Twitter, Facebook or all of the above. Not only is curation a great way to satisfy the content demands of your audience, it can also provide high-authority links back to your site. Whether it’s a mashup, distillation or elevation – your readers will also link to your curated posts and share them with their own blog’ audience.
3. Generating social signals – You already know the impact of social sharing but did you know that it can also affect your search rankings? It’s been a theory for quite some time that sharing on Twitter can impact search results, but nobody knew how much until a study by Branded3 proved that tweets do affect search rankings. That means if you can create content that goes viral, you will get a rush of social signals pointing to that content that will push your website up in the search rankings.
4. Optimize for short-tail keywords – When you start curating content on a particular subject, you will start to pick up the most popular search terms in that niche. Example: When Quicksprout was curating content for their guide, The Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest, they were using high quality short-tail keywords like “marketing” and “Pinterest.” The focus on the short-tail keywords allowed them to rank at the number two position for those keywords.
5. Optimize for long-tail keywords – When compiling an aggregation or elevation piece, you will naturally target long-tail keywords to help draw an audience for that narrow range of searchers. You can see this when you are focusing on a particular topic like Google’s “Penguin” update. Valuable long-tail keywords on that topic could be “recovering from Penguin update” or “ways to recover from Penguin.” You will have plenty of opportunities to use long-tail terms when curating content.
6. Update more frequently – Content curation allows you to create a post quickly. The time savings could allow you to post additional content ( i.e. content for a Saturday or/and Sunday), use curated content while short staffed, or allow you to publish more than once a day (i.e. publishing original content in the morning and curated content in the afternoon). Example: The popular blog Brain Pickings publishes about 3 times a day and it’s essentially all curated content.
Make sure you’re ready
Before you expand your marketing efforts and drive more traffic to your website, be sure you’re ready for the additional traffic.
Upgrade your website software – If you’re using a content management system (CMS), make sure you are using the most current version. Also check any plug-ins or add-ons and make sure they are up to date. Upgrading your infrastructure will help safeguard your content from malicious activities.
Can your websites’ server handle additional traffic? – Depending on where you publish your content, websites like Digg can drive thousands of visitors within minutes. Because of this, you’ll have to make sure your server is ready to handle the additional traffic. A good, reliable hosting company with a decent sized hosting plan is essential.
Be careful – Many social sites tend to ban websites. If you are thinking about submitting a lot of mediocre content from your own website, think again. If you are banned, it is nearly impossible to get your site back in. You do have options, some sites (like Twitter) that do not mind if you submit your own content for people to view. Other websites (like Digg and Reddit) do not work the same way so do your homework and know the platform you are using.
Timing is essential – If you submit a story early in the morning, you will hopefully be the highlighted sometime during the day. This will allow you to reach as many visitors as possible. The more visitors you have, the higher chance that one of them will link to your website from theirs. You might have to adjust your schedule or arrange to have content submitted within the optimal submission times.
Spam filters – Most social websites have spam filters built in. If a story unnaturally gets many votes too quickly, it may automatically trigger a spam filter and your post will be deleted.
Submission text – The headline and description you used in your submission does not have to be from the article you are submitting. You can come up with an unique submission title and description, just be sure they are appealing to your audience.
Patience
If your content does not immediately make an impact, do not become disappointed. You can try again and learn from your mistakes. Remember, it takes time and consistent activity to leverage social media. There are many different variables on how to approach social media strategies due to the differences and types of products and services being leveraged and the evolving nature of social media. By participating, researching, testing and adjusting, you will begin to understand which sites work best for you and your style.
If you are interested in learning more about content curation, I recommend you download a couple of these free guides from Curata. Start with Content Marketing Done Right which explains copyright laws and fair use. It also covers “best practices” with real world examples of successes and failures.