Creating social media content on your social media channels can be very time consuming. But if you don't have regular content going out in your feeds, you could lose audience. Learn what curated content is, the benefits of using it, and how to find the best sources for your audience. You'll be able to reclaim time you previously spent creating content - and get back to doing the work that lights you up.

What is Curated Content

Keeping the content beast fed is a tricky undertaking. You want to always give it a steady diet of posts that are engaging, informative, educational, inspirational, and promotional. If you have a podcast, blog, or YouTube channel, you’ve already got some long form content to cut up into smaller pieces. But if not, you may still want to point your audience towards articles, episodes, or videos that you didn’t create that will still be worthwhile to them. Heck, even if you do, you just may not have time to do all that and keep up with the other work that you have to do. Guy Kawasaki, the author of The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users gets it exactly right when he says, “It’s difficult to create more than two pieces of content per week on a sustained basis, and two pieces are not enough for social media.”

I agree with Kawasaki that you can’t create more than two long form pieces of content per week - let’s say a podcast episode and a blog post. And if you are running a solo operation, then just one long form asset is all that you can do well and sustainably.

Of course, then you have the problem that you don’t have as much to point to in your social media content. So that content bucket may need to be filled and you may be left scrambling.

And it’s hard to gain momentum when you feel like you’re scrambling.

So, if you don’t have your own blog, podcast, newsletter, or YouTube channel that you can commit to posting about regularly, then it’ll be hard to keep your social media beast fed. Which means it will be hard to be discovered by new audience members. And it will be hard to keep a relationship with your current audience.

That’s where curated content comes into play. (In the PAGER Method for social media, this type of content goes in the Articles category.) It looks a little different depending on the platform, of course, but here are ways that you might see curated content already in your feed. On Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook it’s sharing an article someone else wrote about a topic in your niche and adding your two cents to it. On TikTok or Instagram, it may be doing a duet with a popular video where you add your own spin.

With curated content, you find pieces that other people have created and share them to your feed. This way, your social media audience can always expect that whatever you put in front of them - and whoever created it - will be valuable to them in some way. So they will keep following you.

Curated Content to the Rescue

The antidote to this is to curate content - to find relevant information that other people create and share it along with your two cents.

So, instead of making a podcast, you share someone else’s podcast.

Instead of writing a weekly blog post, you find other blog posts to promote.

You get the benefit of filling your social media pipeline, they get the benefit of more reach, your audience gets the benefit of knowing that your feed is going to be full of helpful information.

Get this right and it will save you enormous amounts of time in coming up with and creating social media content. It’s a way to put yourself in a light that says, “I know what I’m talking about here” without having to take the time to write 350 - 500 words about it. It’s also just a great way to feed the content machine.

I’m going to take you through how to find content that will work for your audience, how to put that content on autopilot, and also, how to get that content to bring in more hits to your website.

The basic idea is to:

1. Find relevant, trusted sources

2. Add your two cents (and branding?)

3. Incorporate it into your Content Stockpile

1. Find relevant, trusted sources

If you want someone else’s work on your feed, of course it’s important that what’s being posted is trustworthy and relevant. I like Feedly to find and organize those trustworthy sources.

Feedly is an RSS reader. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. And it’s a way for articles, blog posts, videos, and podcasts to be syndicated across different platforms.  You input the name of the content source that you like and it will show you its most recent content. 

Imagine the Podcasts app on your phone, except instead of subscribing to just podcasts, you are subscribing to blogs, YouTube channels, news sources, and podcasts. In one place.

So you will use Feedly to create a list of trusted sources for you to curate for your audience.

I mean, you don’t have to. But it’s a very easy tool to do so and it’s free.

Next you’ll add your brand’s stamp onto what you’ve found. Step #2 tells you how to do that.

2. Add Your Two Cents

The next thing you’ll want to do is come up with a few reasons why someone would want to check the content out. Benefits they’ll get from listening, your unique thoughts on the matter, and what problems your audience has that are being solved in the piece.

It’s important that you add your expertise and point of view on the matter, so that your audience knows why they would want to check it out, and why you are sharing it in the first place.

When you share someone else’s content on your feed, your audience may become interested in it and click the links to subscribe, follow, or find out more.

It can be a bummer, though, because that means you’re losing out on some of that traffic.

That doesn’t have to happen if you use a tool like Sniply.

Sniply is an app that allows you to add a tiny ad at the bottom of pretty much any website - for free. The ad can contain your branding/logo, plus some wording, and a call to action button.

Although I really like Sniply, many social media platforms don’t. For one, most social media platforms don’t like you to leave their sites and go to another one. So they’re often not favorable to links in general. And two, it is a shortened link, which many social media platforms especially don’t like. So use with caution, but it can be a helpful tool.

3. Incorporate it Into Your Content Stockpile

I like to look through Feedly a few times a week (usually over my morning coffee). I use the tool MeetEdgar to create a few different variations of the article. Then I automate that stockpiled content so it goes out on my social media channels without my having to schedule it on each specific day. This automation saves me immense amounts of time.

Note: I may get a commission from MeetEdgar if you click on this link, but I wouldn’t recommend it if I hadn’t tested it and found it immensely useful.

Save Yourself Time With Content Curation

Curating content is so great because it helps your audience understand that your brand is not only the creator of great content, it’s the curator of great content. So they know if they follow you, they are going to see informative, relevant pieces that may or may not have been made from you, but will help them nonetheless.

Not only that, but you will save yourself hours. You don’t have to publish a podcast that week - you just have to find a great one that has already been published. All you have to do is come up with a few hot takes and you’re ready go to!

Simplify Your Social Media

Many of our clients have started using the PAGER Method for Social Media to simplify their social. With this method, they learn to create, vary, and automate content so that they can free up their time. Get $10 off the next Simplify Your Social webinar with coupon code: BLOG. Register now.