Sharing other people’s content with your audience is a universally accepted best practice in social media. The rationale is simple. By sharing useful 3rd party content, you position yourself, or your organisation, as a valuable information source that your stakeholders will appreciate. In due course, you hope that your generosity of time and effort will be rewarded with a more loyal and engaged audience or stakeholder group.
But how do you work out exactly what value you are gaining by sharing other people’s content? At best, you might see how many people click on the links you share. Or you may get the odd “thank you” from someone occasionally. But how do you know that all this effort in identifying great content and sharing it is really worth it? Sooner or later, someone in senior management is going to ask you to justify the ROI of curation.
The good news is that there are ways to get more demonstrable value from sharing other people’s content. The following workflow uses four tools in combination to deliver a far higher level of insight and return than previously thought possible with content curation.
The tools in question are Buzzsumo, Feedly, Sniply and Buffer. All of these tools operate on a “freemium” model - each allows you to use certain features for free while others require a paid subscription. For the purposes of this workflow, only the free features are needed.
Step one: Using Buzzsumo to identify good sources of shareable content
One of the key features of Buzzsumo is the ability to quickly identify what kind and type of content is being shared most often - and through which social media platforms.
There are various ways you can approach this. One route is to take a particular topic or keyword and ask Buzzsumo to reveal what content is being shared the most. For example, let’s say you wanted to see what content about “public relations” was being shared most frequently.
For the purposes of this workflow, you would use Buzzsumo to see what sources appear to have a high probability of creating highly sharable content. Your aim is to spot, say, the 10 best websites that produce the most relevant and shareable content. These sites will provide you with the initial fuel for your curation workflow.
Once you have identified your best content sources, take the RSS feeds from these sites and plug them into Feedly.
Step two: use Feedly to manage your shareable content streams
Feedly is at root an RSS reader. With the demise of Google Reader, Feedly has filled the vacuum. Feedly works as a web tool as well as being accessible via good (and free!) mobile apps for both IOS and Android.
For this exercise, take the RSS feeds from the sites you’ve identified and add them to Feedly. The job of keeping on top of potentially huge volumes of content is made much easier with Feedly. Use Feedly to highlight particular stories or posts that you think your audience will find useful or interesting.
The next step is to take your chosen articles and then use Sniply to add additional curation rocket fuel.
Step three: use Sniply to gain additional value from your content curation efforts
Sniply is a URL shortener with a difference. When you shorten a URL with Sniply, you not only get bit.ly-style insight into who clicks on your shared links, but you also gain the ability to overlay your own “Call To Action” (CTA) over just about any 3rd party content that you share.
Take the screenshot below. The article itself is interesting and one that my audience might appreciate. But by sharing the article via a Sniply link (or Snip as it’s known), not only do my audience see the original article but I also get the opportunity to highlight to them my own CTA. In this case, a link to a workshop that addresses the issue flagged in the original piece. In short, you get the opportunity to gain some additional benefits for yourself rather than being an unpaid content distributor for someone else.
You have an enormous degree of flexibility in customising your CTA. You have control over the message, position on the shared page as well as the choice of a link, button or email capture form.
But the real value comes from the data gathered via your Sniply links. Not only do you know how many people click on your shared links, but you also find out how long they spend reading the content you’ve shared with them. You can also see whether they then read additional content on the target site (if people do read other articles on the site you’ve sent them to, your CTA remains in place, thus gaining further exposure to your CTA). The longer people spend reading your shared content, the greater the chance that they will see and ultimately click through to your own content. Over time, you should be able to see which content sources actually get read by your audience (rather than just clicked on), as well as giving you a higher degree of return on your curation efforts by giving you the opportunity to drive people to your own online assets.
Advanced bonus tip: Sniply allows you to automatically add a CTA to every post from an RSS feed. This is a very efficient method of curation if there is a particular content source that you are confident will always produce good and shareable content and you have a generic CTA that you would be happy to add to any post from your chosen RSS source. This greatly streamlines the process of generating “Snipped” links for sharing.
Step four: use Buffer to schedule the best times to publish your “Snips”
The final stage of the process is to ensure that you publish your “Snipped” links at those times when they are most likely to be seen and clicked on - thus maximising the visibility of your own CTAs.
There are many different scheduling tools available. For this workflow, I used Buffer because it’s not only a great scheduling tool (supporting a wide variety of social platforms), but it plays very nicely with Sniply. Once you have created your Snipped link, the resulting dialogue box gives you the option to share via Buffer to multiple social platforms at the times of your choosing. Another benefit of using Buffer is that you can automatically convert the Sniply link to a bit.ly link - and still preserve all the benefits highlighted above (some people might prefer to share a bit.ly link rather than a snip.ly link).
