You Ask, I Answer: Best Strategies for Content Curation?

In today's episode, Audrey asks, What are your best content curation tips, strategies, and methods? Content curation is one of those things that it can be incredibly time consuming. When I used to work uh in an agency, I used to watch uh people, humans doing content curation and spending an enormous amount of time on the task. I mean, I saw people who were spending, you know, three to four hours a day putting together content curation calendars for clients and things like that, and uh that's just uh too much time on a task that is relatively low value. It is important to have great content to be able to share it uh so that you're constantly keeping the best of the best in front of your audience.

That you know, no one argues that, but manually doing it, uh at least doing the everything beginning to end is an incredibly poor use of your time, frankly. So how do you get around this? Um I automate my cot my content curation because I either I didn't like a lot of what that was on the market, or quite frankly, uh as a startup, we couldn't afford, you know, the five thousand dollars a month uh Rolls-Royce tools that are out there. Selecting content worth sharing doesn't have to be laborious. It you basically need th um software or techniques, or both, really, for three tasks.

Number one, you need to identify content sources you can trust. Now that is probably uh where people run into trouble in the beginning. It's just like, what do I just Google for stuff? And so services like Feedly and Pocket uh can help you at least surface topically relevant publications in your industry so that you start to see you know what you should be reading. Uh the same is true of Reddit.

Reddit is a fantastic source if there's a uh subreddit for your industry of seeing what articles and things people are sharing from again major publications in your industry, and what you do is you put together that long, long list of all those publications. I typically uh have uh 1500 or so for the marketing and data science universe because there's there are that many blogs uh out there. Second, you need a method, an automated method for determining what content is relevant to your brand. So out of those 1500 blog posts or whatever, or thousands of blog posts, even something simple as a piece of code that reads each post and identifies just keywords that you want to be paying attention to machine learning, data science, artificial intelligence, Google analytics, predictive analytics, web analytics, all these things that you know my company cares about. Those are things that I want to be able to find in these articles.

And you know, you can use very advanced if you want, you know, natural language software and things. You don't you don't need to. I mean, just a a bag of words count, like hey, this article mentions Google Analytics 24 times. It's probably about Google Analytics, right? Something very, very simple like that is an easy way to to count up, okay, which article should we be paying attention to.

Ideally, your code, your software, uh also measures things like social shares, clicks click-throughs uh on the article, uh, SEO uh metrics, so that you can see you get a really good mix of this is a relevant article, and this is an article that already has some momentum for being shared. So that's the second stage. The third stage is summarizing it quickly, and this is where you again you need a piece of software uh that can go into your article database, pull out all the articles that are relevant, that are high scoring and they're likely to be shared, and extract them into a format that you can then use to uh upload to a service like Buffer or Hootsuite or Agora Pulse or any of these, you know, the any of the content sharing services. When you have these systems in place, content curation goes from three to four hours, uh, to three to four minutes, because at that point you can just do a final QA check on the export and say, uh I'm sure that article does mention artificial intelligence, but it's you know, i i i it's clearly something that's a little bit silly, so maybe uh that's not on brand, or uh what tends to happen a lot with uh the the stuff that uh I do is an awful lot of politics manages to creep its way in uh because people do talk about things like data analytics and stuff when it comes to you know who's running for for office and uh or who uh current politicians are are uh you know what the crazy things that they're doing in office. So uh more than anything, I I have had to uh add in uh filters to remove certain articles to to score them you know extra low.

If an article, for example mentions a certain politician's name or a certain politician's tweets to to knock that stuff out because that's stuff I don't want to be sharing. I don't want to be using my valuable social channels to promote somebody else's um thing. So that's the method is you have content sources that you that you can trust. You have a method for determining what content is relevant to your brand and likely to be shared and then a way to summarize it quickly and load it up. That will drastically save you time.

Um again three to four minutes uh three to four hours becomes three to four minutes. So if you can if you can do that now there are services that do that they are expensive but there are services that do that for you um so that if you want to to you know reap some cost savings in terms of opportunity costs you can exchange the hard dollars you pay them for the soft dollars the time that you that you save uh using those services. So if you want you know there's I can't remember there's like a dozen of them out there. Um go check out like a G2 crowd um to see the ratings for these different services. So good question if you have developers in-house if you have software developers in-house and they have some spare bandwidth or you can get yourself access to a sprint um consider outlining this or feel free to show them this video and they may be able to write you your own version of that software that follows those general basic requirements and outcomes and it will save you and your company tremendous amounts of time and probably increase the amount of quality content that you share.

I know certainly the performance of the content that I share has gotten much better over the years because I'm sharing stuff that I know is likely to be shared. Uh and so it helps engage more. I even use that in my email newsletter because if you click on it in social media, there's a pretty good chance you're gonna click on it if it's in an email as well. So when I do my wrap-up in my weekly newsletter, uh all those links are links that uh are c topically relevant but also uh well performing. So great question.

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