Content Curation In Ten Minutes A Day

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Three C's of Social Content - Creation, Curation and Cultivation, today I'm going to focus on content curation. A lot of people seem to be interested in the curation piece but don't know how to do it consistently or feel that it is just too big a job, one that they don't have time for.

I want to dispel that fear for you. Here is how you can achieve good content curation in just ten minutes a day.

Content Curation – Finding the Content

Of course the first component in a Content Curation strategy is deciding where the content is going. Are you curating for a blog, for Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, Chime.In? Knowing where your content is going is part of the battle.  Twitter for example lends itself more to headlines than images. Pinterest is totally visual. Facebook and Google Plus work better with images but can cope without them.

How do you go about finding the content? There are several ways of doing this, but I am going to cut to the easiest and quickest, use a tool. There are so many different content tools available now that it seems ridiculous to me that more people aren't using them.

Pulse
Taptu
Google Currents
Feedly
Alltop

These are all great sources of content for your audience. I personally use all of these on a regular basis.

Content Curation – Get Organized

So now you have found some content how do you keep track of it and organize it for publishing? Again the simple answer is tools. You can use anything from the bookmarks button on your browser to online tools that allow you to access the content from anywhere you can access the web. The latter is my preference. Some of the tools that allow you to do this are:

Instapaper
Evernote
Readitlater

Of course there are a lot more of these and other "Social" bookmarking sites.

Content Curation – The Workflow

Now we have our content, we have somewhere to save the content to for later, how does it all fit together in a ten minute activity?

The setup as with most activities is what will take the longest – this is a one off activity (though it is good to fine tune as you go along). Firstly decide on your favorite content sources, but avoid the big producers. For example if you are curating Social Media content don't use Mashable – nothing against Mashable I read their content most days, however so does everyone else. Resharing their content just adds to the noise. Find more original sources. Also don't be afraid to step outside your comfort zone and use different sources.

Remember the content you are curating is not just for your consumption its for your audience. I have 22 boards on Pinterest that all need content if people are to keep following them, they are all on different topics so I am constantly refining the sources I use for them.

Use your content aggregation tool everyday, select your stories and save them to your bookmark tool. Then decide which platform the content pieces are best suited to and publish them.

With a little practice and persistance I promise you can achieve content curation that produces a steady flow of interesting content that will not only entertain your existing network but help you build a bigger one in just ten minutes a day.

I'm glad you took the time to read this post.


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