Curating as a Social Media Marketing Strategy

For a lot of people and businesses, summer is a slower season.  Not only are customers on vacation, but staff members are as well.  So how do you keep your social media pages flush with great content when there just isn't much going on around the office?

Simple: curate.

The internet is not lacking in content: 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, Facebook boasts close to one billion pieces of content shared on its site each day, and Twitter users are generating 200 million tweets per day.  In all of that content, you can use your expertise to find posts, videos, pictures and articles that are relevant to your topics of influence and your fans interests.

Personal Example: My Shakespearean theater company is not working on a show right now, but that doesn't mean our Facebook fans are tired of watching great Shakespearean performances.  So, since I don't have any content to generate at present, I'm featuring clips from some of the greatest Shakespearean performances recorded.  As a former Theater and Performances Studies major with a minor focus on Shakespeare (through the English department) I've had the good fortune to be exposed to a lot of great performances and learn which were legendary in their time.  By finding YouTube clips of these performances and providing a little background, I've successfully curated great content and added value to my Shakespeare company's Facebook page.

Twitter is where I see the most curating activity at present, and it's very useful!  Often I decide on whether to follow a Twitter user based on the usefulness of their posts.  Whether or not they've written the posts themselves is not always a problem as long as they are truly good curators.  I do try to find the best content generators to follow as well, but they're all the more welcome and credible if they're fantastic curators.

In the end, the people who provide the most relevant and useful information to their fans tend to succeed.  If that means the content you share is curated from time to time, don't fret: you're still creating value for your fans.

-Dani Loebs

P.S. If you're nervous about how many pieces of content to post, the Science of Social Timing from Kissmetrics is a great guide.  Just click on the infographic to enlarge after you follow the link.