3 Clever Ways to Discover and Share the Very Best Content on Social Media

Key Takeaways

hi everyone welcome to the webinar today um we're about 10 or nine minutes away so I just thought I'd get things started here and um I'll open it up with just my slide deck and uh yeah we'll get going here in a couple minutes um so nice that everyone is chatting with each other in the in the window there too e e e e e e e e minutes and it's so cool to see the conversation off to the side um definitely feel free to say hi to each other um share any curation tips you all might have and uh look forward to getting things started here just a couple minutes e e e e all right well it is just on the hour here so I think I'll go ahead and get us started um so great to see everyone um and the wonderful CH chatter off to the side here in the comments um hi there I'm Kevin I am the director of marketing at buffer and I'm so grateful to see you all here today on this on this webinar the response to this has been amazing we've had uh 5,000 people signed up for this one and I see there's about 300 or so 266 in the the chat here at the moment I'm going to email this out after afterward as a full replay to everyone else who who couldn't quite make it and also just really quickly wanted to mention off the top here um this is the first of five webinars that we're doing this week I know that a lot of you have signed up for all five um thank you for doing that so I just wanted to give a quick teaser to the ones that are coming up next this is a quick list of them here so we have me today tomorrow is our Instagram marketing one with Ash on Wednesday I'll be back with you for social media data and analytics on Thursday Brian's going to join us for diagnosing the Facebook Newsfeed sharing some cool tips there then on Friday Haley is going to be here to talk about social media PR and Outreach so it should be a great great week thanks so much for taking some time out to join us today so yeah while I'm talking here if you all want to ask any questions or share any thoughts or resources in the comment stream um you'll find it off to the right of the page which is let me see if I'm pointing the right way I think it's opposite this side all over here and then if you're watching on mobile or on a tablet it should be down below underneath the video and with that let's go ahead and get started I'm going to do a bit of screen share and a bit of slides so I'll be switching back and forth between the two a little bit here first off with our slide deck so great so today's topic is three clever ways to discover and share the very best content on social media and there's some really cool stuff here I think it's one of my favorite topics for sure it's something that uh that I've done a lot of before um it's basically content curation is what it is and it's a term that I'll probably be using quite a bit in the webinar it's something that uh that we do a lot of buffer um in terms of our sharing and it's helped us a lot with things like oh our our fluence our Authority it's helped with our reach and I'm excited to share some tips about how we can get this get this going for you all too so in this webinar I'm excited to teach you all some efficient workflows for finding great content online that's one of the harder things to do out there believe it or not so I'm going to share some of our best tips that we like to use I'm going to share how to run a complete content curation strategy and the great part is you can do this in as little as one hour per day which is pretty exciting and of course to get there there's some great tools and websites that are used by the best social media sharers and I'm excited to share what those are with you so first up is this kind of brief overview of how to curate content the way that we tend to break it down at buffer is three different steps the first step is to discover the content the second step is to read the content and the third step is to share the content and of course that probably seems a bit obvious in maybe a bit natural that's great like in in theory content curation is a very simple and easy thing to do it's discover read and share where you go from good curation to Great curation is the way that you go about each of those three steps both of them the time that it takes you so how efficiently can you work with these things then also the depth and the quality with which you do each of these are you finding the best stuff are you reading it in such a way that you're recommending the best stuff then are you sharing it are you getting it out in front of the people who want to see it and who matter most so in terms of the workflows I wanted to start with number one which is curate from the curators and where this idea comes from is that there's already so many wonderful brilliant amazing people out there who are curating content for their audiences and they're kind of doing some of the work for us already which is great so thank you very much for those those who are doing it and the places that you can find this is newslet and communities and tools so there's lots of great places to look this is how I got started with curation I was mostly just a reader at first and then it went from reading to you know sharing and then it went from sharing to targeted sharing curated sharing in a way that was focused on a particular topic and brought me some uh some significant some significant results and I'll quickly share kind of what this might look like for for me in particular and what it might look like for you all too I'll switch over to my screen here for just a moment so this is my inbox and I pull all of my newsletters into this inbox here and I tag them with a certain tag so this this story here with the blue tag is from drro snack which is a neat little one tip a day newsletter and it's more just based on tips what this tag also does is it represents all the newsletters that I have that are curated so curation from curators so if I go over here to the left hand column and click on stories I'm able to scroll through all the different newsletters that I subscribe to and read them all at once so that I can share and and curate these links all at once so for instance I have growth hackers on the list and it pulls out some of the best posts from the week in here I have one from make change which has 10 different links that are sent once a week some really good stuff in here I have one from Ann Freedman who is a wonderful author and she has this whole paragraph here is just chalk full of Great Links that might be worth sharing so that's one of my flows is curating these curators within my inbox um when it comes to communities I might go to a place like growth hackers or inbound or Hacker News this is the the growth hackers homepage and as you can see it's a community that votes up different stories that are submitted to the site each day so there's some up here about an AMA with the person who does growth at Milla um something about getting featured in Apple's App Store so it's really great I don't have to go find all these posts they're often from a very diverse set of of domains and blogs and and resources so it's great that they get found for me in a lot of ways and then this is a quick look at Hacker News again it's another up voting system it ranks the stories here on the left and then you can see a little point total right below so this again is a crowdsourced way of surfacing some of the best content this will look really similar to a site like Reddit also which curates this content for you on a very topical basis a very categorical segmented basis and then when it comes to tools there's another neat tool here I wanted to show you first before we switch back this is a tool called panda and what it does is it collects all sorts of different sites it's it started more as like an aggregator for different sites and now it's kind of switched to even something as powerful as an aggregator plus an RSS reader so I can change and add any different thing that I want to this home this homepage here right now I have girl attackers listed on my lefthand column which is a great marketing resource but I also have some other options here some of these are are websites so it's just a simple RSS feed others are places like product hunt which shows the biggest hunts of the day these images off to the right this is dribble which is a design resource and I can change this to to other things I can manage feeds I can add add different feeds um here's a whole list of them here then I can see it all on this visual dashboard I can change the look of the dashboard I can you know do all sorts of different different stuff here and one of the great things about panda you can set this as your homepage and right when you start off your day you're good to go with stuff that's already curated for you so let me hop back into the presentation now so curate from the curators is the the first workflow the second one is to curate automatically automatically like it feels like magic when you're doing some of these things um when it comes to this one we really enjoy using tools like if and zapier and those again are if.com and zapier.com they're really wonderful tools and you know we combine them with buffer we combine them with pocket we combine them with fely these other great tools that help you share read and discover different content and just to kind of quickly show you one of the ones that I have here I'll share my screen again real quick so this is the if website if.com iftt and these are all the recipes that I have some of them are turned off some of them are are still there uh this is one I've had for a while so it's down at the bottom of my list let's see here it is so in Pocket which is a read it later app whenever I find a story that I like I can give it a star and it automatically puts that story from pocket into buffer for me it grabs the picture it grabs the heading the headline for the story and I'm good to go so here is a look at my pocket um here's my home fade here I have a list of favorites off to the left they have little stars that are noted here and if I want to I'll star that you know if I see something that I like I'll give it a star and then a few minutes later when I hop into my buffer que my my buffer dashboard um I'll see lots these ones down here and this might be really small to be able to see this um but it says via if.com right next to my picture down here which means this one came from pocket to if excuse me from pocket to buffer via if and same with this one below you can see it grabs an image it's another one from pocket that grabbed an image some cases it won't grab an image which is the case here and that's just as simple as opening this up to edit taking off that picture then while I'm in here I can change the the title and the heading too but that's a really big timesaver when it comes to curation workflow okay and then the number three way the third workflow here is to curate from your followers and this has a couple neat tips so again this is a very tools related one um you can do this manually by just foll fewer people or or maybe following people but being on social media a lot so you're seeing all the stuff that comes through um I tend to use a couple tools to kind of make this a bit more of an efficient flow for me the first tool is nuzzle and the second tool is refin and both of those are nuzzle dcom rein.com and I'll quickly show you what nuzzle looks like here so nuzzle is an app that looks at your friends that you have on Facebook and on Twitter and it pulls out all the links that they have shared throughout the course of the day here it is here this is nuzzle and then it ranks those those articles that they pull out based on how many people are sharing them based on the reaction to these these articles they get shared and it sends it to you in a daily digest this just happens to be the nuzzle homepage and you can come here to see your digest also but this is also going to arrive in my inbox tomorrow um first thing in the morning and I'll be able to see the top three posts that are shared even the top posts that are shared from friends of friends so something on like those related networks that might be surfacing or becoming viral that you don't might not know about otherwise um but it shows you what's been shared here in the in the links below it shows you the story itself and there's lots lots of content here that you can sift through and the second site refin this is a new one to me um there's there's uh the person who started Maz Rand fishkin he suggested this one to us his picture is here on the very left um that's Rand right there so thank you Rand for the tip on this one it's very similar to nuzzle in that it surfaces content based on the people that you follow so these articles here are ones that have been shared by people that I followed on Twitter and you know even not if I don't have to follow these people they can just be influencers who I choose within refin to see the stuff that they're sharing but it works really great it also has a digest option to have stuff emailed to you and the one thing about refind is that it is an invite only service at the moment so if you want an invitation to it or are curious to learn a bit more um feel free to email me afterward Kevin buffer.com and I will share as many invitations as I can or I can maybe even reach out to the refin folks um and let them know that some of us might be Keen to to get into this one great so that's the three workflows so we have discover read share you can curate from curators you can automate this stuff so that it happens quickly and automatically and uh you can curate from your friends and your followers and when it comes to this flow and to do it quickly do it an hour or less so we have discover read and share this chart here is what I imagine is the ideal setup for this kind of this kind of workflow the bulk of it in blue here is discover so in my mind I'm spending you know three quarters of my time discovering content I'm going out to all these all these different tools you know subscribing to newsletters reading newsletters um within feedle which is an RSS reader I have you know 25 websites that I have personally chosen as these really great sites that I want to to learn from and discover content from so it takes me a lot of time to discover the content takes me a bit less time quite a bit less time to read the content which is great um I tend to be very very picky about the content that I share and I think that's something that most good curators will also share um you don't share something unless it meets this certain bar of quality this certain standard for yourself which helps the reading time you know take up less so you know like as soon as this isn't meeting that quality bar then you can move on to the next article and if it's not you know sometimes it's not even quality sometimes it's just the fit with the audience and the topic that you want to be be sharing about and then the very last little yellow sliver is share percentage and in my mind you can share this content um you know 5% of your time is all this should take in your curation workflow 75% with discover 20% with read 5% with share and here's some specific tips then on what this is going to look like in order to cut that down from an to an hour per day overall and some of this we've touched on already so curate from curators this is going to help you go faster because the curation work has already been done for you when you're coming up with the list of content that you want to discover I tend to limit this to 25 go-to content sources this is great because it doesn't mean I'm spending Forever on certain sites especially the sites that the curators are already curating from typically these 25 content sources are under the radar ones that not too many other people know about I hope follow interesting people and then you can see what they share this ties in well to tools like nuzzle and refind which once you're following these people nuzzle will pull out the stuff that they're sharing automatically for you and then anytime you find a new content source to curate from give them give them a probationary period you might not you know spend a couple weeks with them and if it's something where you're curating stuff two or three times with them the course of those two weeks that's great if it's that you found one article initially and nothing more then maybe it makes sense to drop them from the list and trust that the good content will surface itself as time goes on when it comes to reading content I highly highly recommend getting a readit later app um much like pocket and then once you're in that app you definitely stop reading as soon as you know if it's a yes or no like we talked about with whether it reaches that bar that quality bar or that topic bar if it fits your topic or or industry well enough if it doesn't hold your attention it's probably not going to hold the attention of your readers so that's kind of nice nice test if you're thinking of of should I share this or not and these last two are kind of interesting it's okay to skim the articles that you're share that you're that you're choosing to read but do so within reason you don't want to get caught out if you're sharing something you didn't fully read and it has something in it that you might have missed that doesn't necessarily fit your tone and then sometimes images make the best text I thought that was a really cool example of this I'll uh I'll show this one to you on on my screen here let's see thanks for bearing me with me with all this back and forth switching okay so my feely by the way just some some links that I have here um have sections for writing and marketing and within this feely I found this this article from first round and they do a really great a great blog on thought leadership management startups this article is about receiving radical cander and you know they they write really long articles um wonderfully long articles like lots of great stuff in here I might not read all this one so this is one that I might skim when it comes to to curating images even just when I scroll through this I know this is going to be a quality article because I trust the the site itself and the blog itself um but this image here so radical cander is what what the article is about but it also talks about these other four area these other three areas empathy insincerity and aggression and you know this this picture in and of itself you know kind of tells the whole story there so this is something I might curate on on its own without needing to read the whole thing and again that's Saving Time overall in the curation workflow and then the last little tip here for cutting your curation workflow down to an hour per day this is the sharing portion and you can see it has fewer bullet points than the rest because hopefully this is as quick and easy as can be so the first part is to get a social media scheduling app buffer of course is the one that we we tend to use them of um set up an automation workflow so again this could be something like if or zapier with if for me that's super simple I find good stuff to read I add it to pocket everything I favorite from pocket goes into my buffer queue and I'm able to share it from there and then other folks you know when it comes to sharing you can either share via social media and set yourself up as a thought leader there or you can share via email and create your own email newsletter that shares links um you can you can totally do both also it's definitely not an either or um so if it is if it is an email route that you want to go there's lots of good email Solutions out there that help speed that process up from you having to do everything manually there's tools that will pull in the articles that you love automatically and basically you have your whole email set to go and you just have to clean it up and press send and I'll talk about those here in just a minute great so the last section here I wanted to touch on some top-of-the-line tools for Content curation um these are some of the favorite ones that we have at buffer and maybe some that you all are familiar with too so for social media scheduling and for publishing and analytics um there's lots of great options out there this is what buffer is is for and is all about um thank you so much so many of you out there who are buff for users already it's a significant part of our curation workflow for sure there's um other other tools in the field as well hoot Suite Sprout and sprinkler um when it comes to curation I think all four of those do a really great job buffer in particular is built for publishing in a lot of ways so it makes that process especially smooth um intuitive uncluttered it's just a really nice nice clean experience for readit later apps um we talked about pocket a bit already which is a wonderful one it's one that I use um myself all the time they have a really neat extension too that it works really great on Chrome so as you're scrolling through Twitter there's a little pocket icon that you can click and add tweets and links on Twitter straight into your pocket so lots of cool Integrations there to to Really speed that process up and the same with insta paper very similar to pocket both these tools are going to take the articles that you put in there strip out all the extra stuff and make it a really clean reading experience and in paper just got bought by Pinterest too I believe so there might be some cool stuff um coming down the pipe there for RSS readers this is a really cool one um I'm be curious in the comments if you want to leave any thoughts on RSS readers that you all use or love or used to love um I personally was a big fan of Google Reader back in the day so I'm still still kind of adjusting to life without Google Reader but the one that has filled that that that need for me is feedle you know Far and Away they have a wonderful wonderful app that um that makes it really easy to read on iPad and on iOS and definitely on Android too there's also some other options dig the website they have their own RSS reader called dig reader there's one called the old reader which I believe is created to look can feel quite a bit like Google Reader and uh then in the comments I think I saw someone mention a Flipboard earlier this is an awesome one I haven't personally got into footboard too much but I've heard wonderful wonderful stuff about it it's a very visual form of RSS almost like a a personal magazine to a certain degree so a very very cool tool and then this part here for seeing what your friends are sharing on social um the two tools we talked about nuzzle and refin um again let me know if you want to to get an invite into refind and we can see if we can hook you up there and then nuzzle is a great tool also which is free and uh fully available to everyone and this is the bit about email newsletters that they wanted to cover so we have good bits and curated and these are really cool and the way these work is you basically tell the these tools what you like so you can pull it in from RSS you can have it come from different Integrations it's going to pull this content into the dashboard for these different tools and then from within this dashboard you can basically build and create the newsletter itself rather than having to pull it all in manually um I have a good bits account so I wanted to show you quickly what this looks like in practice too great so this is my good bits dashboard here go to the main screen so in the right hand pane here is my email um so good bits has pulled in an image and the name of the article that I want to share this middle column here is all of the content that I have asked it to um kind of integrate into the layout here so that I can choose these and add them into my email so this is one that I had read before um and if I want to add it it's as simple as dragging and dropping there it is and then the way this content gets here is you can configure different sources into your good bits flow so one of the connected sources that I have is all my pocket favorites so this is like a theme I'm noticing is coming up I favorite a lot of things in pocket uh this is the same flow that I have that puts stuff into buffer so anytime I favorite something in Pocket it gets added to good bits and there's some other options here too so any tweets that you do that contain a link can be sent directly into good bits um any RSS feeds that you have if you share anything to buffer that can come straight into your queue same thing with slack anything that you send in slack channels can go directly to your queue so this this like blows it way out that like this is this is really powerful stuff that can save you a lot of time so not not only are you you don't need to keep track of what stuff you're sharing anymore you don't have to go find it manually come back and add it into your email newsletter with an image and a title and make sure the link is right it all happens automatically for you here in good bits and another good thing about good bbits is that it connects to MailChimp um there's some different pro pro plans and paid plans and these ones will help you get all set up with MailChimp integration um different designs and layouts so lots of cool options here if email curation is something that you're Keen to explore great just a couple more sets of tools here so these are if you're doing email if you'd rather do a straightforward newsletter so if you do want to do a bit of that manual curation some of the ones that I was showing you earlier from within my inbox like Anne freedman's for instance I believe it was originally built with some of these tools um so again like it can be fast I know you know hers was just a big block and paragraph of text if that's the route you want to go these tools are awesome um tiny letter is probably the easiest one to do campaign Monitor and mail champ are a bit more robust I'll quickly show you my tiny letter screen here so this is Tiny letter it's like it's really super simple um so this is my personal one there's a few subscribers in here but um this is just the draft itself so it's a simple HTML layout and template um give it a subject give it a message and when you're done just click Send uh you can fully manage your subscribers here you can export them and add them into a bigger tool like MailChimp or some other some other one and then for the design you can design a subscribe page very simply it's basically a headline who you are and a little text here you can add in um an archive link as well it shows links to past emails then you get to customize the confirmation email and the unsubscribe page so really basic but really powerful stuff um if it looks familiar at all it's because MailChimp owns tiny letter so mailchip is the big robust option and Tiny letter is the simple lean option and then one more one or two more screens here so this is tools for e sorry about that everyone think my connection drop for a second wanted to quickly show you the link to letter list I'll grab it here in my right so here's letter list so it has a nice collection here of a bunch of different newsletters as you're scrolling down you can see um some of my favorite ones from this list is Zenit play this one here for future crunch bringing the donuts is a great one and any of these you can sign up for automatically um you can log in with Twitter and then it connects you to these to these newsletters right Away Great I think that brings us to the end of our slides here perfect right on time sorry for the slight blip there at the end um I hope I didn't lose too many of you there um thank you so much for hanging out with us for this really fast quick run through of content curation I know there was a lot to chew on here a lot of different stuff that I shared we do have complete notes all the details from what I talked about today lots of different Links at a blog post that we wrote last week it's blog.bufferapp.com content-creation and I will make sure to share this link in the follow-up email for everyone as well um if you have any questions definitely feel free to get in touch with me directly I'm Kevin Lee on Twitter and on email Kevin buffer.com um and thank you so much for joining us we have a webinar tomorrow a wonderful one with Ash it's GNA be all about Instagram marketing I'll be sure to get in touch with you all with the link and the location for that one tomorrow um and yeah thanks so much everyone chat with you again soon