We talk about how important content is to our clients on a daily basis, and also how sharing other peoples content helps build your expertise. As evidence shows, being an informer over a meformer increases your follower count and helps you form relationships with other users.
But where do you find the content you want to share? And more importantly, how do you save time finding the content? We have so little time spare to research other peoples content that we need tools that help us, and not add to our workload.
The best tools to use are those that have done all the hard work for us. Using Twitter as a listening tool is fantastic if you are searching a certain keyword, but what about all the latest up to date news that is happening within your industry? How do you know what that is, and where can you find it, quickly?
In the Cosmic office, we favour Feedly over anything else at the moment. It is an easy to set up platform, which we can log into daily to find out a summary of all the news articles and blogs around the subjects we are interested in.
Creating an account is simple, and then you suggest subjects you are interested in. You may already follow blogs or sites, and you can search for these too, click ‘follow’ and their stories will be added to your feed. You can add as many subjects or accounts as you like. You can also create different feeds – this is useful if you manage other accounts, or you have more than one business interest.
Each feed will give you the most popular stories of the day, and then list in order your unread ones. We can then log on to find out what has been happening in the world of social media, or tech, or SEO, or whichever subjects we have stored. These articles are incredibly rich content, which we can then share throughout our social channels. By balancing our own content with that of others, means that we can give more of a rounded view and share a huge variety of content, which we’d be unable to create ourselves.
Google Alerts is also an invaluable tool to use to source great content. This also has the added advantage of emailing you all your search results straight into your inbox. You can search whatever term you are interested in hearing about – whether it is a subject, person or location and then enter how often you would like the updates. Google then searches the web and sends the results that contain your search terms to you. Daily, weekly or monthly – you decide on when you want them emailed to you.
Once you have received the email you can then have a quick filter through the content and share that which is valuable for your followers.
Another tool that helps collate content from Twitter is Warble Alerts – just like Google alerts, Warble sends you updates based on the search terms you have chosen. However this is only through Twitter and on a daily basis. This is more like Twitter listening in that you can search for users or hashtags – but you can also search for certain content that you can then go on to share throughout your social or web platforms.
We also do a huge amount of content searching on Pinterest – we have spoken many times previously of how valuable Pinterest is when looking for content to share. Searching a few keyword phrases of your sector will bring up a huge host of blogs and articles that you can then pin or share. This also has the added benefit of being visual which makes searching easier.
If you are mostly content searching on your mobile, then Flipboard is a brilliant app to download. It is a ‘social news magazine’, which is based on your preferences. So you decide what stories you want to hear, and like Feedly, it collates a newsfeed based on your choice. Again – you can then share the content that is relevant and interesting to your audience.
We recommend choosing just one or two of the tools mentioned above – it is important not to use up too much of your valuable time searching for the content, as you want this to enforce your social media activity, and not add to the headache of fitting it in! Make sure that you are balancing out sharing your own content alongside others. It has to fit with your business message, and must be relevant to your industry, or interests.
If it is content that has made you stop, read and share, then the likelihood is that it will do the same for your followers. If you would like to talk to us about content, and the best ways to find and use content then please do get in touch.