The Power of Exploding Toilets and Golden Content

Every day, my inbox fills up with several e-newsletters, Google alerts, monitors, and blogs. While most people would call this “spam” or “useless trash”, this daily influx of emails is a treasure trove of golden content for me. I am a content curator, or in laymen’s terms, I collect and share content from others. While it takes a little time commitment, there are two really good reasons why I do it and why you should too:

1. Content Curation Feeds the Social Media Machine

For most customers, we recommend posting to Facebook daily if possible; and if not, at least several times per week. Because of its rapid pace, Twitter requires an even larger time commitment, and we recommend posting several times per day. And, of course, Pinterest is all about content curation (80% of all pins are repins!).

Collecting and sharing content from others helps fill the social media void and keeps you from having to create all of that content yourself. Plus, on Facebook interaction on these types of posts can help keep your posts visible to fans.

My favorite gem this year:

Articles like this one about toilets with bursting parts is how we keep an active presence on LinkedIn for our customer, Evers & Associates, an independent insurance adjusting firm. Their business is primarily referral and relationship-based and because of the confidential nature of their business, there are very few social media posts they can generate on their own. Content curation helps them keep a visible presence on LinkedIn and adds fresh content to their website.

2. Content Curation Feeds the Google Machine

We have said it before and will say it many more times, Google wants fresh content on your site. This does not mean taking someone else’s content and putting it verbatim on your site. You need to create original content on your site, but you can use content created by others to help provide useful links for your readers or to support what you are saying. Providing attribution to the original source is a must and contacting the original source is not only recommended, but can also provide extra benefit, as they may share your content, too.  

Finding Exploding Toilets and Content Gold

While all news will not be as exciting as exploding toilets, it is not too hard to find content gold. Here are my favorite ways for finding content:

• Subscribe: Sign up for e-newsetters and RSS feds from news publications, bloggers, and sites that are producing content that you and your audience would be interested in.
• Flip: The app Flipboard is a content curator in its own right. Pick a topic and daily content is delivered to your phone for you to flip through and share.
• Monitor: Services link Google Alerts and Talkwalker will deliver news to your inbox based on topics you choose.
• Watch: While you are looking for things to share on social media, social media is a great source to find shareable content. Follow interesting people and companies and share, retweet, and pin those that you think your audience will find interesting too.

Looking for something to share now? Feel free to start with this blog post. Just don’t forget to tag us.