If you’re in the business of social media marketing you already know one thing to be true, content is king. This is stated all the time… and for good reason. Without compelling content, your readers and potential clients have no reason to actually care about you or the business you manage. Now that we’ve established content’s importance, how do you curate the best possible content for social media? Keep reading, you’ve got questions, I’ve got answers.
How to Curate Killer Content:
Tell stories
One of the best pieces of marketing advice I’ve ever received is “Stories Sell.” Why are stories so effective? When we break it down, it makes a lot of sense. When you read someone’s story it gives you a chance to connect with them on an emotional level. Psychologically, if you’re reading a story you’re able to emotionally connect with you become invested. It allows the reader to draw parallels and connections from their own lives to the story being told. A great story will have a conflict and a resolution at the end. Your reader normally still has that conflict and is looking for answers, that’s where you come in. Why is this important for marketing? When your reader is emotionally invested in the story, and their conflict matches or mimics that of the story tellers, they are ready and willing for a solution. At the end of the story, encourage your reader to get the same results as the person/company in the story. Give them hope and then give them a solution, more importantly, your solution. Because obviously yours is the best one, right?
Use Relevant Visuals (Images/Videos)
Instead of me personally trying to get you to understand just how important images and videos are to social media marketing strategy, I’m going to give you the facts: 1. Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images. (Source) 2. Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. (Source) It’s important. You get that. Now. Where do you find it? Finding picture and video content that is free and legal for you to use can be a challenge at times. If you’re representing a business page, one of the worst things that could happen is using illegal content (and getting caught). When in doubt, don’t use it. Free ways to find and curate pictures and videos: 1. Create graphics yourself There are many different ways to do this. One of the easiest ways I’ve found is using Canva. If you’re on social media, you should be using Canva. They have templates for graphics you need for all of your social networks.
2. From your users Ask your users to submit their own photos and videos. You’ll have to get creative with this as people don’t always voluntarily share their pictures with you for you to reuse for marketing purposes. One thing most people do enjoy, though, is recognition. Use incentives to help people share their photos with you. 3. Memes Memes are easy to find, easy to use and people love them! Chances are you’ve found yourself liking and sharing a meme or two. Remember, the people you are marketing to are just other people. If you find something funny, they likely will too.
Find out what people actually care about
When you’re creating content, don’t just assume you know what people want to read about or look at. There are ways to actually find out. For example, if you are writing a blog post and want to know what to write about, search for other blogs that have similar content to you. Look at which of their posts got the most engagement and then you’ll know which topics people care about the most. The same thing can apply to Facebook or Instagram graphics. If you’re not sure what to post, check other people’s or businesses pages to see what is getting traction there and then post something similar. It’s not copying or stealing, success leaves clues and you’ll want to respectfully mimic the strategies that offer the greatest amount of success. Now that you know how to curate killer content, the world is yours! Utilize people’s stories, use graphics and videos, and find out what your audience actually cares about. Do you have any go to tools for content curation? Let me know in the comments! For daily social media tips, follow me on Twitter!
