content curation Archives - LiftMetrix Blog

As we find ourselves trying to find out what topics are hot and useful to our users we seem to keep coming back to the same websites. As we wrote in our “Content is King” blog post, having the right content for your users can make all the difference. So understanding what’s trending can be extremely helpful across any spectrum of your social media marketing. We thought we’d share our sources with you to save you some google time. Check out 5 places we go to see what’s trending:

Twitter: Obviously but we had to put it! And if you aren’t sure how to work it, you can change your trending topics to a city, entire country or even the world so you can get a bit more narrow for your target audience. Turn on or off your tailored trends in order to see the more common trends vs the ones that are skewed to what you tweet and who you follow. If you want to get really crazy, check out trends map for real time location trends.

Twitter Trends: May 13, 2015

Trends Map: May 13, 2015

Alltop: This site does a great job pulling all of the top and trending articles from a variety of sites including mashable, fast company, wired, cnn, and more. In addition you can create your own topics based on your tastes and customize the site for free. From tech to culture you are sure to find the topics you want to read and share with your audience. To make things easier, there is a home page with a general overview and a search box that allows you to type in anything that matters to you. Alltop will then suggest categories and tags that you can select one at a time to display the most popular posts from specific categories.

Alltop Homepage: May 13, 2015

Google Trends: Sometimes you have to go straight to the source. Taking a look at what’s being searched for frequently on google can give you some insight into what users care about today. You can narrow your search by country and see exactly how many times the trending topic was searched. Dig into trending searches to get more info on the searches trending with up to date links.

Google Trends: May 13, 2015

Medium: Started by the founders of Twitter it’s a blog publishing platform with a variety of topics and details covered. It’s a great place to go for inspiration on writing blogs from titles to post content. Top stories allows you to see the most read blog posts and can help inspire you when you narrow down to some of the tags and topics.The trick is to browse articles that are about specific topics such as tech, blogging, social media, entrepreneurship, or growth hacking. Whatever is most popular in those categories is usually exceptionally well written and inspires many bloggers to share similar experiences or adapt titles to their niche.

Medium Homepage: May 13, 2015

There are tons of sites out there and great content all around but these are our go to sites to see what’s the most popular among most users. Having content that is based on what’s already popular is one of the best ways to ensure traffic. Is there any other site you think we should include?

Everyone says “Content is King” and really, it is for all of your digital efforts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to do all the work! We think social media is for sharing and that includes content! If you see good content, leverage it! Here are 4 simple steps for content curation to amplify your existing digital efforts:

Get Set Up! This includes searching out industry news sites, blogs, partners and affiliates and putting together an RSS feed. There are many great tools out there such as feedly, storify, flipboard and of course is integrated into many social management software. In addition, we would recommend creating a twitter list to easily see their content on a daily basis.
Determine what’s relevant. Although you will see tons of great content, you can’t overwhelm your readers and followers. If you are unsure how many posts you should share per day, try using a tool such as LiftMetrix with custom recommendations including number of posts per day. It’s important to decide what’s relevant to your users and what you want to share. In addition, make sure you have an opinion on things you share as well. Again think about using tools or analytics to see how your users engage and leverage your entire team to come up with a list of requirements to decide relevant content.
Prepare to share When sharing content, not only do you want to get it out but also add your opinion or a reason to share. Either write your opinion within your social copy or add more through your blog, but always, always give credit to the original author including linking or tagging on social.
Organize and Track! This is always the end of any process…but maybe the most important. When posting and tracking, add keywords or tags and understand what types of content are working the best with your audience. From there adjust your strategy from #1 based on your findings. Within LiftMetrix you can add tags to posts and then receive insights and recommendations based on these keywords.

There are tons of great tools out there to help with your content curation, scheduling and posting, such as one of our partners Hootsuite. See our blog post on the integration here. We’d love to hear which ones you use and prefer in the comments below!