Use the social media planner to curate content

There are lots of different ways to curate content for your social media. We have previously written about different resources for finding curated content and why you should use curated content as part of social media strategy, but in this post we are focusing on how to use the social media planner to curate your content.

01 Decide on your Themes and Key Messages

Before you start curating content you should be clear about the themes and key messages that you are wanting your social media presence to be known for. For example, if I am writing in my professional context and I specialise in a niche area, I might want all my content to be about that niche topic. My content curation would then be about content that aligned with that niche to “add value” to my audience and customers.

02 Keep a Record of Useful Resources and Websites (and make sure that they are added to you RSS Feed).

Your starting point, will always be well-known resources and established experts that are on message for you or which align well with your content. These are likely to be the blogs and websites that you read anyway as they are clearly writing about content that you are interested in.

Then you should look to build you resources to include lesser known content and thought leadership pieces. You might come across these when doing research, when networking, when browsing social media. Whenever or whereever it is you should get into the habit of keeping a record of useful content and adding it to your list (which is included in your social media planner) .

03 Use the Planning Pages to plan out your Curated Content

Some of your curated content will be simply reposting on message content as and when you see it.

However, sometimes it will be more than this. Sometimes you will want to share your own insights, put your own twist on it or simply quote or share the most interesting element. The Social Media Planner Planning Pages can help with this. You might want to:

• plan when you share other people’s content (to ensure an even mix of different content types)
• plan/draft your commentary on someone else’s post or content when you share it.
• write a blog post or long form post based on the content to put your own spin on it and use your social media planner to plan this and the promotion of this (to ensure that credit is properly given etc).
• to share third-party content in line with your own ongoing content, themes and campaigns.

Need help setting your social media campaign goals and planning your social media content? Why not grab a copy of our Social Media Planner.