Content Curation on Twitter: 7+ Secrets Revealed

If you haven’t read part 1 of How to Quickly Find and Grow Your Twitter Following, please do so before reading this post.

So you have the basics of your Twitter growth strategy rocking and rollin’, right?

You’ve got a deep understanding of your target audience and the keywords and hashtags they use on Twitter.

You’ve started mass following your target audience bi-weekly.

You’ve got relevant auto-mentions setup, and you’re engaging with new followers on a regular basis.

If not, then please go back to Part 1 of How to Quickly Find and Grow Your Twitter Following, and get moving on those steps first.

Now what we are going to cover in extreme detail is content curation and the exact process to pump out quality and relevant content to your audience that has a direct impact on your Twitter growth rate, but also your website traffic and business.

But first…

What is Content Curation?

Content curation is simply finding great resources that can help your target audience in a meaningful way. The internet is presenting you with millions of choices when it comes to what to read, share, and use. Your job is to find the best stuff. The most relevant stuff. And share it with your audience to save them the trouble of doing all that work.

Why Should I Curate Content?

I’m sure you’re thinking this sounds like a great way to promote someone else’s business instead of your own…

But you’re wrong. And here’s 5 reasons why content curation is more important than ever:

1. You can’t answer everyone’s questions all the time. Sure you’d like to be the Wikipedia of your industry, but odds are you aren’t pumping out 7 blog posts a day that tackle all of the problems that all of your customers are having at any given point.

   If you do have a massive amount of your own content, then curation may not be as necessary, but it still plays a role. And if you’re like the rest of us, then it’s muy importante.

2. People don’t stop existing after they are done interacting with your business. Put another way, someone that buys from you is probably going back out into the world to buy dinner, drive a car, watch TV, and 100 other things that people do on a daily basis. These are all opportunities for your brand to impress them in areas outside of your core business.

   Now, you need to tackle your core business first, and most companies should keep their content (and curated content) very “close to home…” But all I am saying is that you will not create content around every aspect of your customer’s life, but you can point them to resources that cover the other areas. If you’re providing that added value to them, they will thank you for it by becoming a loyal customer.

3. Your competitors are not a secret to your customer. People think they shouldn’t share content that comes from other places because it’s “sending business to the competition.” But as marketing legend Marcus Sheridan says, “Customer ignorance is no longer a viable business strategy.”

   They will find out about your competition. You have a choice: should they find out about them from you, or from someone else? You choose.

4. Content curation increases account activity. This is probably the simplest reason to do it. By increasing account activity you increase exposure and therefore follower growth. I’ve already told you that Twitter account growth is 90% correlated to Tweet frequency. So Tweet more and win.

   But you can’t just Tweet crap, and you should be careful how repetitive your Tweets are as well. For that reason, you should use a content curation strategy.

5. Content curation provides your user with more value. In case you weren’t getting the theme of all of these points, I will state it here for you:
   

   Content curation is the act of providing additional value to your users, without the hard work of creating every piece of great content yourself.

   Sure, you’d love to be the one writing and providing all those blog posts, videos, or even products, but time and money are finite resources. Focus on your business and curate what’s around your business to help foster relationships with your users/customers.

Bonus Reason: Link Retargeting. You can pixel your audience and serve targeted ads to them later. More on this in the bonus section at the end.

7 Tools for Curating Content on Twitter (and Beyond)

Content curation can be done by hand, but why? It’s kind of like taking a cab instead of an Uber. It’s going to take you longer, cost you more, and it just kinda smells funny…

Here are some of the tools I’ve used or use for content curation. While they all work for Twitter, most of them can be used on Facebook and other platforms as well:

Meet Edgar

This one is my go-to. Meet Edgar allows you to put content in a “recycler” for it to be repeated over time. You simply fill out your content calendar:

Plug in the content:

And turn it on.

This is perfect for building a large content library of evergreen Tweets and ramping up your Tweet frequency.

Quuu

This tool is a content curation powerhouse. Quuu basically cracked the code on curated content. Here’s how it works. Log in, choose your categories and number of posts to schedule and you’re done. Boom:

They have already curated hundreds of posts in multiple categories. All by hand to ensure quality.

I was curious about their review process and how they keep the content quality so high, so I asked one of their investors, Sujan Patel, just how it worked and he said:

“Quuu has a vigorous review process to ensure that the quality of content shared by the 20,000+ users is top notch. Our typical review process takes less than 24 hours and during the process, we’ll even rewrite your share text to ensure it has maximum exposure.”

So when it comes to top-notch curated content, this is the best place I’ve ever seen. To get started, all you have to do is find the category that relates best to you.

On the flip side of their marketplace, you can also submit your content to their platform to be shared by dozens of people. It’s a great way to get people engaged and sharing your content for cheap, plus it drives a bit of traffic to your site.

Buffer

As far as content curation goes, I use Buffer for scheduling Retweets, which we will get to in a minute. You could use other tools, like Hootsuite, or Mass Planner, but this is the one that works for me.

Flipboard

I use Flipboard for organizing my curated content into a library. You can use Pocket or Paper.li too if you’d like.

If you’re like me, you’re out on the internet reading 10 blog posts a day… Or at least opening 10 blog posts a day and scanning 1 or 2. When you find something good out there on the internet that fits your audience, you Flip it. This magazine is a great place to store relevant content so that it’s easier to find and curate later. Then you come back when it suits and put the content into Meet Edgar or schedule it in Buffer. More on that in just a minute.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is great for finding content that performs, then “jumping on the bandwagon” and sharing it as you. They basically track how many things are getting shared on social media and what’s trending.

This can be helpful for more trendy companies that need to curate content in real-time. I don’t use it for curation purposes myself, but it’s a great tool for say fashion, sports, or nutrition sites.

Triberr

Triberr is more of a community type of app, where you can find and follow great content curators and quickly gain access to the content they are sharing. I don’t use it myself, but I’m thinking about jumping on and starting a following. Maybe it will work for you.

Rebrandly

Rebrandly is actually worth a mention here, because I wouldn’t get the same results sharing content without it. But it sits on top of the sharing tools as a better way to create a custom, branded link, which helps drive brand awareness and increases click-through rates. Bottom line: I wouldn’t share a link without using this tool and I suggest you do the same. Oh and check out the bonus section below for what really makes it a must-have… 

My Exact Content Curation Process

Let’s cut to the chase…

Here’s the exact strategy I use to find and curate content in the social media, digital marketing, and growth space. And I’ve used this strategy outside of Rebrandly, for companies in the nutrition space, agency world, and more.

But for this post, I’m only giving you resources related to the digital/growth/marketing industry.

Here it is:

Step 1: Get on the Email List of All the Best Blogs

It all starts with an email or Slack message or something coming in from someone that I have already found and trust for curated content. So let me help you with a list of my top 10 favorite places to curate content from in the digital marketing arena (also, if you’re adding blogs to your list, may I suggest Rebrandly as well)…

Top 10 Content Curation Sources:

10 other noteworthy spots for finding great content in growth/digital/marketing:

And of course there are 50 other blogs worthy of mentioning, but I’m going to cut it at this.

So go to those sites and sign up for their newsletters and your inbox will be clogged with tons of high-quality content opportunities.

Step 2: Flip What Fits

As you’re going about your day, simply Flip anything that fits your audience, most specifically the evergreen posts that fall into one of your main content categories.

Simply hit the Flipboard extension button at the top of your browser, choose the right magazine (it only takes a second to set up a magazine), and add it to your library:

Do this for a week or so and you will have a nice magazine filled with evergreen content.

Step 3: Create Your Curated Post

After you’ve built up a backlog in your Flipboard magazine, schedule out 2 hours of one day each week and prepare for content curation. For this task, I recommend Meet Edgar, but you can do it with Buffer, Hootsuite, or others, it’s just not going to keep posting the content over and over again for you, which means more work later.

Go to your Flipboard magazine and scroll down to the oldest article that you haven’t curated yet. I use the Flipboard favorite button to separate out what I have and haven’t curated yet:

Click on the article. Then open up Meet Edgar -> Add new content in another tab or window (personally I use 2 30 inch monitors to best handle this task, I don’t get you kids and your 15-inch laptops!) and follow these steps:

1. Download the main image from the curated content and upload into Meet Edgar (if there is no main image, consider not curating this content… All great content should have an image).
2. Rebrand the URL using your Rebrandly Chrome Extension to make it short and sweet, and trackable, and under your own brand name (we used noteworthy.xyz in this case):
   
3. Write a fantastic social post with proper hashtags and your rebranded link:

   
   Note: You may also want to use “via @mention” to mention your source and possibly get them to share or give some love to your post. I didn’t do it here, but I usually do.

4. Save to the library under the proper social accounts (just twitter for this one, but we could add Facebook or others). And repeat the process until your fingers hurt.

Bonus: Link Retargeting

OK, so we’ve got all this curated content going out on autopilot for us, great. But no one is coming back to our site. Well… they are clicking on our links, which counts for something.

When curating content online I actually find that 80-90% of the traffic that I am driving is going to someone else’s site, and usually, you would just lose this traffic forever… Until now.

Link retargeting is an advanced URL shortener feature that you can use with all of your Rebrandly links. Here’s how it works:

2. Insert your Facebook, Google, or another retargeting pixel, and name it.
3. Save the retargeting code and the link and you are ready to roll.
4. Once your links are all set up, anytime someone clicks on a link going to someone else’s site, they will be added to your custom audience as if they had visited your own.
5. Run a retargeting campaign, which could cost as little as $1/day, targeting all of your website visitors over the last 30 days. This will include all of your curated content clicks!
6. Watch as your retargeting pixel grows and more traffic comes in through retargeting ads.

For more on Link Retargeting, check out my blog post: What is Link Retargeting?

Double Bonus: If people clicked on the link from Twitter, run Twitter retargeting ads, if Facebook, run some on Facebook. This converts better, because they’ve already seen you on that platform, so they aren’t shocked to see you again. But it’s time-consuming to set up, so if you’re a small company, don’t bother.

Scheduling Retweets

Retweeting existing posts is another great strategy for curating content. While scrolling through your newsfeed, or doing a search for a keyword or hashtag, simply look for related content that you think will fit your audience and retweet it to share it with them.

Now, if you do this 10 times in 2 minutes, and then none at all for the rest of the day, you’ve kind of missed an opportunity, and that’s where Buffer comes in. Simply install the Buffer Chrome Extension, and when you’re scheduling a retweet, it will look like this:

And when you click Buffer Retweet, it will take you to another screen where you can add it to your existing social media calendar queue, schedule it for a preset time, or simply publish right away:

Do this 10 times a day and you will be rocking and rolling. If you can’t keep up, just try to do it a few times a week (which is what I do). We don’t always have all day to schedule retweets.

Final Thoughts

Curating content is the bee’s knees. Why aren’t you doing it? It increases your account growth rate, it can build trust with your audience, it can make you an authority in your industry so that key players want to do business with you and reach out to you, and it can even increase the size of your retargeting audiences, thus helping you drive even more top of funnel traffic.

Once we’ve got content curation in place, in conjunction with our strategies that we talked about in part 1, we will want to dive into how we get our own content in front of more people. So next up, blog post promotion.

What do you think? Are you going to start curating content? Or do you have a clear reason why you shouldn’t? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Originally Posted: August 9th, 2016.

This content was originally published here.