Content Curation: How to Easily Find Great Content to Share

Do you curate content for your blog and social media sites?

Want to discover how to find remarkable content to share?

To learn how to explore content curation, I interview Ian Cleary.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Ian Cleary, the founder of RazorSocial, a marketing tech blog focused on social media tools. His blog has been awarded a top 10 social media blog by Social Media Examiner in 2013 and 2014. Ian is also a very popular speaker.

Ian explores content curation, why it's valuable and tools that make the discovery of new content easy.

You'll discover what content curation is, why it's important and how to find and share relevant content.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Content Curation
Ian's journey

After more than 15 years in technology, Ian started doing social media consultancy and training. He wanted an international business that combined his knowledge of tools, technology and social media, which led him to RazorSocial.

Ian explains when he started the blog just over two years ago, he initially focused on guest blogging. Ian developed relationships with other people in the industry, seeking out opportunities to guest post on similar sites. It got his name out there and drove traffic to his site, which was the intent. He then had to make sure his site had really good content.

Ian now has more than 100,000 visitors to the site every month. They run webinars and sell online training. Ian's primary focus is to still build relationships and provide quality content. "People are prepared to buy our premium content because they know we deliver good content all the time," he says.

Listen to the show to hear more about Ian's networking strategy and the story of how we first met.

What is content curation?

Ian believes that content curation is about finding relevant content and sharing it in a meaningful way. For example, if you do a weekly roundup post, don't just list article titles and links, instead add the reason why each post is interesting.

Curated content can be your own articles, as well as posts from others. When Ian compiles his email newsletter, he'll put in his latest posts, but he also picks out some of his popular older articles, and points out why he thinks they would be valuable for his readers.

Listen to the show to discover how Ian curates his own content.

Why marketers should care about curating content

Ian explains how content curation builds up a marketer's authority. If your audience trusts you because you consistently share good content, when you share your own material, they're more likely to engage.

On the flip side, if you share consistently bad or irrelevant content from other sources, people won't be as interested when you share your own articles.

Listen to the show to find out how Social Media Examiner curates other people's content.

Ian's content sharing strategy

When Ian shares other people's content on Facebook and other social media platforms, he puts a line before the article link explaining what the article's about and why it's interesting.

Ian also explains how he curates content for posts on his blog. For example, he recently did an article on podcast tools. He reached out to podcasters, and asked for their three favorite podcast tools. He compiled the response and wrote a summary.

This type of post is both valuable and shareable. The influential people in the article share the post. Plus, Ian created a custom image with a picture of everyone in the article.