Hold on a minute before you send that tweet. You’re excited to share great content from around the web, but before you do so, there’s an important question to ask: what exactly is valuable content in the eyes of your audience? Without defining your content curation mission, you’ll have one of two problems. In one scenario, you’ll find nothing because you’re not quite sure what it is you should be sharing. On the other hand, you can fall into hyper-curation mode, sharing anything and everything regardless of topic or quality.
So slow your content curation roll for a minute and use these four questions to help define your strategy. Write it down and keep it nearby to keep your sharing on track.
1. Who are you sharing with?
Sure, you can make general assumptions about your Twitter followers, but we all know how that goes. Instead, dig into the data using Followerwonk to analyze your handle’s followers. The report returns demographic info such as age, gender and location, but more importantly, a word cloud that pulls common keywords from followers’ Twitter bios. These are a good indicator of interest, and some common sub-topics might surprise you and add depth to your curation efforts.
2. What do these links say about your brand?
Imagine that for some delusional reason you print out all of the links you’ve shared over time and bind them into a nice book called, “Brand X’s Favorite Links”. What does this book say about your brand? Is it so hyper-specific that it’s dull and monotonous? Does it inexplicably jump from random topic to random topic? Determine the story you want to tell beforehand and you’ll have a better idea of which content is a fit for your curation strategy.
3. What is your competition curating?
Take a look through the Twitter feed, Google Plus stream and Pinterest boards of your competition. What, if anything, are they curating? Ask yourself what strategies you could borrow from them, and more importantly, what you could add to make yours even more valuable.
4. Write your content curation manifesto
Pretend that you’re rewriting your brand’s Twitter bio (or actually do it, for real) to fit this new content curation strategy. The bio starts, “Follow Brand X for insights on ___________, ___________ and ___________.” Fill in the blanks, an there you have it: your content curation manifesto.
Check out our full series on how to curate content below.
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