Finding high-quality social media content to share with your audience requires a few things—time, practice, and a bit of strategy. If the average person has an attention span of only 8 seconds, you don’t have much time to capture your audience’s interest. That means your feed needs to be super engaging!
So how do you weed through the enormous amount of content out there to find top-notch stuff? Here’s a guide on how to curate the best content to share with your community, including what to look for and where to find the content.
Provide Super Useful Content
Maybe you read a personal finance blog post that helped you save $200 on your bills. Maybe you found a diet regimen that works better than the 10 other plans you’ve tried, and you’ve already lost 5 pounds. Don’t you think someone else out there might benefit from this content too? If you’d want to see it on your own social media feeds, others would too.
One of Neil Patel’s philosophies for creating awesome content is, “If you don’t have anything useful to say, then don’t say it at all.” You can apply this idea to finding content too. If it’s not clear how you can benefit from the content, don’t share it.
Get a Reaction
This is the kind of content that evokes a powerful emotional response. Have you ever sent someone a post that made them go, “Whoa, crazy!”?
There are many ways people can react to something. They might be excited, scared, disgusted, angry, sad, or incredulous. However, one of the most powerful emotions in social media marketing is happiness. According to Business Insider, a recent study found that “content that has a positive emotional narrative was shared more often than content with a negative one.”
The takeaway is that people inherently want to feel good and be happy. Consider this the next time you’re combing your feeds for shareable material!
Post the Most Relevant Stuff
Be conscious of when you share the content, especially if your niche tends to be seasonal (for example, DIY or home decor trends revolve around seasons and holidays). This is why staying up-to-date with trends in your niche is super important.
Make sure you’re not sharing something on how to save money during Christmas while it’s still summer!
Social Media = Sharing
Whether the content is really useful or extremely compelling, social media thrives on sharing the content with others. Just think of Marie Kondo asking you, “Does this spark joy?” If you can’t wait to message or email your friend about something, it’s probably worth sharing with your community.
To get some inspiration, look through the social media posts you’ve already shared with friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever platform floats your boat. Why did you share that particular content? If you felt compelled to hit that “share” button, there must have been a specific reason. Figure out the “why” and try to replicate that in every piece of content you share.
Where to Find High-Quality Content
Now that you know what to look for, where can you go to find it? One strategy is to use platforms you’re already on to look for great content. Here’s a list, along with some tips and tricks, to get you started.
Of course, sharing relevant stuff from people you follow on Twitter can be a great way to find content. But you can also use Twitter as a search engine to help you find targeted content in your niche.
Twitter’s advanced search options allow you to search by hashtag, mentions of specific usernames, exact phrases, and more. You can even save these search options for quick access later.
Pinterest is the ultimate visual search engine. If your niche contains a lot of visual content, Pinterest is a powerful tool you can harness.
If you don’t already, upgrade your account to a Pinterest Business account. You’ll get access to Pinterest analytics, including the ability to see what content you’ve pinned is a top performer. You can also use a third-party application like Tailwind for more detailed analytics.
- Google Alerts and Google Trends
You can set up Google Alerts to email you anytime content on your desired topic or keyword is published online. You can customize your settings to receive “only the best results” to help you filter out content.
Google Trends shows you what people in all parts of the world are searching for. You can see what keywords are trending and use that as a starting point, or search for your target keywords to view who’s interested at a given time or in a particular location.
- Content Aggregators
Sites such as Reddit, Bloglovin, Feedly, or other content aggregators are an easy place to find a lot of awesome content from many sites, all in one place. On Reddit, you can find a community for just about any topic you want. It’s a treasure trove of content waiting for you, if you’re willing to dive in and sift through everything!
Bloglovin particularly great if your niche is in fashion, beauty, lifestyle, home design, and DIY projects. You can discover a ton of great content in these categories and find new blogs to follow.
Feedly is a news aggregator that allows you to easily organize and read about the latest news in your industry. The sophisticated AI learns what content you want more of and what content you don’t want, resulting in a highly customized feed.
- BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo has many awesome features such as Content Discovery and Content Research. You can browse trending topics, find new topics and content, and search forum posts (Quora, Reddit, Amazon, etc.) to see what your audience is asking about.
- Email Newsletters
Sign up for emails from other blogs in your niche, including potential competitors and top blogs. You can search Google for “top X blogs” or “top X sites” (X equals your niche) to find lists of the best blogs. You can also use keyword research tools like Ubersuggest to see what sites rank at the top for that particular keyword.
Then, check out their sites to see what content is popular, and subscribe to their newsletter to get the latest updates. Chances are, they’ll be among the first to post about hot topics.
- YouTube
Don’t forget about curating video content! The nice thing about YouTube is, once you search for and find a video that fits what you’re looking for, YouTube automatically populates your account with related videos that you can also use for content.
Naturally, Instagram is the place to find visually-stunning content to share. One strategy is to do some hashtag research. Compile a list of the most relevant hashtags and make sure to follow them on Instagram. Also research other blogs and brands that are in your industry and follow them on Instagram.
Besides beautiful photos, Instagram is also a great place to curate inspirational quotes, tutorials (including videos), cool stories, etc. Just make sure to credit your source properly.
Pocket is a handy app that allows you to save interesting articles you want to read later. You can create custom categories to organize the content and even highlight key passages you want to remember. Once you save some articles, Pocket generates a list of recommended articles related to your interests.
Of course, there’s Facebook. Finding shareable content can be as simple as asking your Facebook followers or fellow group members what they like to see, and where they find their favorite content. You can also check out all of the sections under “Explore” to find the top Facebook Group categories, top Pages suggestions, popular videos, etc.
How to Share Content
Now that you have your content, what’s the best way to share it? Here’s an overview on sharing across different social media platforms:
Community Sharer
Community Sharer is an awesome way to automate your sharing, saving you tons of time. Use Community Sharer to collect a variety of top content from your niche and automatically look for new posts from your favorite sites. Basically your own social media curator on autopilot!
You can create multiple “communities,” each with their own homepage and members. You can allow members to add to the community feed and they can invite others to join.
Many people use Twitter to catch up on the latest news, and typically check their account multiple times a day. Twitter is one of those platforms where it’s okay to post multiple times a day without being spammy.
Use Twitter to update your followers on breaking news and recent trends in your industry. To keep it interesting, don’t just post text. Try adding links, images, animations, or even videos to see what works best for your account.
If you haven’t tried videos and live videos on your Facebook Page, it might be time to start! Videos are more engaging than images and text in many cases. If you’re not looking to get in front of a camera, try creating your own animated videos. Apps like Moovly and Animaker make it easy to get started. You can also launch your YouTube channel with all these awesome videos you’re making!
Again, visually-pleasing, high-quality images are king on Instagram. But you don’t have to stress if you’re not the best photographer. The great thing about social media is that you don’t have to rely on yourself to create all of the content. Use the tips above to curate your content.
If you’re sharing quotes or stories, you can create eye-catching graphics to go with the text. If you’re not a graphic design whiz, Canva is a powerful tool that allows anyone to design beautiful graphics in no time.
This is another platform that relies heavily on images, although the images you want to use can be quite different from Instagram.
Beautiful photos are still great on Pinterest, particularly for things like home design inspiration or food, but you also want to focus on images with text. Look for images with enough text to get you interested in clicking on the link. Too much text might turn people off because the pinned image tends to be hard to read unless you click to enlarge it.
Infographics are popular on Pinterest because they contain easily digestible information in one little image. You can search for keywords like, “how to save money” or “tips on cleaning your home” to see what infographics pop up.
Start Sharing
So there you have it! How to find interesting content that engages your audience, where to find that content, and how to share it.
There’s so much information on our feed these days, there’s no room for junk content to clutter it up. Do your audience a favor and don’t clutter theirs up, either. They’ll appreciate you as a curator and continue following you for the latest and greatest content.