A popular buzzword in 2011, content curation is a concept most marketers understand but haven’t quite figured out how to implement. How could most marketers? Content curation is time-consuming (and time is something marketers don’t have a lot of), not to mention the fact that content curation takes a certain level of dedicated expertise, and most marketers are left randomly bookmarking content with no real strategy in mind.
The thing is, most of that content is shared via social media networks. Twitter and Pinterest, at their very cores, are curation tools. Users share content that others can access at their leisure. It’s a fairly painless process for everyone involved, and is a great way for content to be discovered.
But what about curating YOUR content? Or, let us rephrase that. As a marketer, you’re aware of the power of social media. You use it to research your brand, your competitors and your target audience, and you also use it to research future trends and hot topics that correlate to your brand. You’re aware of some of the great things people are saying about your company and your company’s products/services. You’re even aware of the not-so-good things. There’s just so much of it, that it’s literally a full time job to monitor every social media network. So how do you share the good things? And how do you share all of those great things from across multiple social media networks? That’s where social media curation comes in to play.
Social media curation takes content curation one step further. We’re all familiar with the embedded Twitter and Facebook widgets on some websites. They’re great for showcasing interaction, but there aren’t any filters, which means anything and everything can be displayed if it includes your handle or company name. While censoring free speech generally is not a best practice, having pornographic or profanity-laced content on your company’s home page probably isn’t ideal.
Our social media curation technology allows you to create filters so that inappropriate content doesn’t appear on your website within your social media widget.
Maybe your website doesn’t have a social media widget, but you would like a way to gather and display all of your social content in one place rather than having it scattered across a dozen different networks. A social media press room can easily solve that problem for you, and is a great way to showcase everything your company’s doing—all in one place.
It’s also possible that your goal is fan interaction. Social curation tools can also be a great way to create fan pages and microsites, where fans can interact with one another across the social sphere. Microsites are also a great way to create buzz around a specific campaign.
Social curation is also a powerful tool for events. If you host an event, effectively utilizing social curation can help attendees stay abreast of what’s going on, which sessions are packed, the best events and parties to go to, and more. Combined with filters, moderation and blacklisting, event planners can leverage real-time social curation to its full advantage.
Yes, we just said real-time. Unlike most forms of content curation, social curation is real-time. Using time and date filters, you can not only display current social commentary (such as tweets and check-ins) but you can also display past commentary, such as Instagram photos and even Tumblr posts.
Social curation is a powerful tool, and better yet—after the initial set up, it does most of the work for you!
