If you’re like a lot of social media marketers, you will spend a lot of time searching for content to post on social media. This is often referred to as ‘content curation‘ and we’ve spoken to marketers and other professionals who spend up to a day a week finding useful content to post on their networks.
As Neil Patel points out on the QuickSprout blog – curated content on social media account for 47% of all clicks, and given it’s much more time-efficient to curate content produced by other people, than create new content again and again, it’s well worth the time investment to share curated content on social media channels.
But as Neil Patel writes in another blog for Buffer:
Even though social media tools do the posting for you, they don’t find the content to post. This is your job.
But what if I told you there is a platform which finds the content to post. What if I told you that you could create your own personalised news feed which goes out to the trusted sources you respect, and delivers interesting articles according to keywords you put together.
How does that sound? Pretty exciting I expect.
A complete platform to curate content for social media
Neil Patel suggests spending half an hour searching for content on various networks.
- 5 minutes searching for content on Twitter
- 5 minutes searching for content on Facebook
- 5 minutes searching for content on LinkedIn
- 5 minutes searching for content on Google News
- 10 minutes searching through niche blogs and websites
He then suggests copying all those links and quotes into a document and warns against getting distracted.
I’m suggesting you spend 10 minutes scanning one personalised news feed, automatically posting those links into a board which is attached to the same platform, and given it’s all self-contained, there is no way you can get distracted by click bait articles.
Ok – but you’ve been promised personalised news feeds before. And they get way too much to handle because you are completely inundated with content which you can’t control. So you’ve given up with your personalised news feed.
Cronycle doesn’t just aggregate content together in one place. Cronycle offers you powerful filtering to make sure you’re only served articles which contain keywords that come from your specified sources. This ensures you get a limited number of very relevant articles a day.
A platform to save articles to post for later
A completely customised news feed is great. But when something is running off an algorithm, you want to make sure you are only posting the best articles from that news feed. You need a ‘holding area’ of some description where you can annotate those articles so you know what you may say on each social media platform. This is what Neil Patel was using as an open document – a place to house the best links you’ve curated.
In that holding area, it would be useful if you could post articles which didn’t just come from the personalised news feeds. It would be useful if you could hold articles which you find whilst browsing the web, either on your desktop or on mobile, so you can review which posts you’re going to send out before sending them direct to your scheduler.
You could finally be in control of curating posts to share on social media – and it could take you just 10 minutes a day.
Start with Cronycle today
Cronycle does exactly that. Cronycle provides you with customisable news feeds which take sources you trust and filters them using keywords which you provide. Cronycle then has a dedicated annotation space we call a board, where you can pin relevant articles to discuss with your team (if you like) before shipping them out to a scheduling tool.
How to create a workflow which is optimised for social media on Cronycle in eight easy steps
- Start by signing up to Cronycle. You’ll be given the option to search topics or sources of your choice to create your first feed. If you are extensively using Twitter, connect your account to see suggested Topics.
If you already use an RSS aggregator, try importing your OPML and recreating your feeds. You can then curate from our sources library where you can also add all the Twitter account you follow in Twitter (Pro & Enterprise accounts only). - Download the Content Clipper for Chrome or Safari. Whilst you’re browsing the niche sites which you check for interesting content, check to see if they have a relevant RSS source and add that to Cronycle. Or add good articles directly on your boards in Cronycle.
- Add any of your Google Alerts to Cronycle. Type in the keywords you usually search in Google News and make sure you get the RSS feed. Add this to Cronycle. More info here.
- In your feeds, type in a list of keywords which you would like to be included in the content in order for them to be relevant for your social media channels. Other filters and sorting orders are available to help you save time. More on this here.
- Create a new board and entitle it ‘SocialMediaPosts’ or ‘TwitterPosts’ or ‘FacebookPosts’ – it’s up to you how you organise your Cronycle. Set up publishing to Buffer, Hootsuite or Zapier from that board so content you’ll save and approve gets published to the connected social media accounts. More on publishing to social media here.
- Add articles to the relevant boards as they appear in your news feeds or using the Content Clipper on your browser or mobile device.
- If you want, use editor approval to give you time to reflect and add summaries before content is sent to your publishing option(s).
You can also share individual content from any feed or board directly to social media (without the summary).
And there’s a quick and easy way to curate content for social media.
Don’t just take our word for it…
This is just one application of using Cronycle. We are also used to curate articles for blog posts, market research, employee readiness, etc. But this is a great application for marketers and social media managers and a lot of people are having a huge amount of success with it. It’s incredible value for the amount of time you save. Check out our pricing here.
