How To Identify New Social Media Content Sources

Need more ideas to fill the gaps in your social media posting calendar?

Looking for sources and tools to help?

Social media is quickly becoming one of the most important aspects of digital marketing, which provides incredible benefits that help reach millions of customers worldwide. And if you are not applying this profitable source, you are missing out an incredible marketing opportunity, as it makes it easy to spread the word about your product and mission.

Content is the fuel of Social Media.

Let’s look at some of the benefits.

Improved Brand Awareness
Cost-effective
Engage with your customers
Improved brand loyalty
Healthier customer satisfaction
Marketplace awareness
Increased traffic
Enhanced SEO rankings

When we’re marketing online, there are three issues that concern us above all others.

These are:

How to find good content to share with our audiences.
Which tools to use to share that content.
How to figure out our reach when we share it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m always on the lookout for tools that can help with those tasks.

WHAT AND WHY OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Let’s go back to the drawing board. What is marketing? As highlighted by the AMA, Marketing is the activity and process for creating; communicating and delivering offerings that have value to customers.

Now look at social media marketing. Social Media Today argue that the purpose of social media marketing is to build a brand and increase a brand’s visibility, through building relationships and communicating with potential customers.

The two seem to go hand-in-hand. But you may still be wondering, why social media?

‘‘Social networks are one of the fastest growing industries in the world’’.

This statement does seem to be thrown around quite frequently with anything internet marketing related these days. However with a projected 25.0% annual growth over the next 5 years, it is definitely be time to start investing in social media if you haven’t already. This is so important we’ve added a fancy tweet-this box below…. partly to show off, partly to make it easy for you to share it!

Let’s take a look at some content sources and tools to amp up your BRAND!

FEEDLY

Be in the know

Keep up with all the topics that matter to you. All in one place.

The feed reader known as feedly offers an easy way to aggregate your information feeds in one place. Feed readers aggregate internet content into one convenient place, making it possible for you to quickly scan headlines and full stories at a glance from a variety of different providers.

You don’t have to keep checking back to any particular site to see if it’s been updated; all you need to do is follow an information source, such as the Wall Street Journal or Mashable, and then read the updates from those sites as they’re delivered to your feed reader.

Using feedly

Starting an account at feedly is easy. You have the option of setting up an account using familiar logins you may already have established, such as Google or Facebook, or you can set up a unique login for feedly by selecting Continue with feedly and using your email address. Once you’re signed up, you can start following news and information feeds.

A screenshot of feedly showing how to add a URL feed or select from existing topics.

Feeds are grouped by topics, trends, industries, and others. Selecting these will offer you a list of feeds that fall into that category. If you’re looking for a specific feed, such as your favorite blog, you can search by keyword, the website name, or the RSS feed address.

Navigating the feedly home screen

Once you’ve subscribed to a few feeds, feedly will show you a personalized home screen with all your feeds shown in order of the most current on top. You can organize your feeds by topic, helping you read according to what you need quickly.

You can read all your blog subscriptions at one time by clicking on your folder’s name. Or, you can toggle each folder, found in the left sidebar, and see your feeds listed individually.

A screenshot showing the controls to manage feedly subscriptions.

SCOOP.IT

Why Scoop.it started

Once an opportunity, publishing content has become an obligation for professionals and businesses. With the new social media and SEO rules, it’s content that now drives their online visibility, defines their areas of expertise and helps them generate new business and leads.

But content is hard.

Scoop.it started because they believed software and technology could make content publishing much more time-efficient and impacting for professionals in general and marketers in particular.

How do content curation tools work ?

A powerful content engineScoop.it’s advanced content engine monitors global sources to find and curate relevant third-party content.

With a content curation tool you’ll:

Boost credibility with readers and build brand awareness
Establish thought leadership and strengthen influencer connections
Access sources ranging from mainstream media to niche publications

Monitor and share knowledge with coworkers privately

Make it easy for your team to discover, curate and share content.

Automate content monitoring
Share curated content privately with your team
Generate internal email newsletters in a few clicks
Create private curated content hubs for your team
Integrate with SSO, intranet and enterprise social networks

Publish curated content for targeted audience

Leverage curated content: store, share, categorize and disseminate it.

Aggregate curated content on one or multiple websites
Publish content on one or multiple WordPress blogs
Share your team content on multiple social media
Generate customized newsletter for Mailchimp or any emailing solutions

LEARN MORE

IDENTIFY NEW CONTENT SOURCES WITH ALMIGHTY PRESS

While many social media marketers rely on services like Feedly to bring them news from selected sources, sometimes going out in search of content can provide better results. Scouring the Internet for social media inspiration can prove challenging, which is why a tool like Almighty Press is so valuable.

This tool works wonders for your content discovery efforts. After you sign up for the free 14-day trial, click Content at the top of the page and perform a search for any relevant keywords. You can also focus your search by adding specific websites or phrases you’d like to see displayed in your results.

For this example, we’ve searched for the keyword “startup” on any article from Forbes. Adjust the time filter to see results from any time from the last hour to any specific date range.

You can also adjust the engagements filter. This will alter your results to only show content with the corresponding social shares you set within the filter.

For our illustration, we’ve left the engagement filter open ended, and set the time filter to the last 24 hours. Here are some example results:

From here, you can head to Forbes to read the articles, curate your own post that syncs with your WordPress or Medium blog (including a featured image and personalized writeup), or share the article directly to Buffer or your social media channels.

Even if you’re not using Almighty Press as a scheduler or for publishing articles directly to your blog, it offers a deep set of search features that make it worth the price tag. Almighty Press offers a 14-day free trial, before charging $27/month for use of the service.

STAY CURRENT WITH EVENTS VIA TWITTER’S BUSINESS BLOG

You won’t want to miss out on any trending events on Twitter because those events will likely be trending all around the web. Thankfully, Twitter’s Business Blog publishes a calendar roughly 1 week before the end of every month to keep you ahead of the game.

With the calendar, you get a great overview of trending events coming up and expected tweet impressions for each event. This can provide inspiration when setting up your monthly social media schedule, allowing you to capitalize on the biggest expected events of the month on Twitter.

You can download the full Twitter Marketing Calendar for the year directly from the blog. However, they typically add new events every month, so it’s best to check back every month for any new additions.

FINAL THOUGHTS

When you create social media content daily for your brand or your clients, it makes sense to gather as much creative inspiration as possible.

There is no denying that Social media marketing has many advantages for startups and established brands. By regular updating the right social media marketing strategy, it will lead to increased traffic, better SEO, improved brand loyalty, healthier customer satisfaction and much more.

Your competition is already increasing on social media day by day, so don’t let your competitors take your probable customers. The earlier you start, the faster you see the growth in your business.

About Blair

Blair Evan Ball is a Social Media Coach and founder of Prepare1, a company that works with businesses, individuals and non-profits. He is a former executive with a Fortune 50 company, and his national division did $1Billion+ in sales annually.

Blair has written three e-books: Facebook for Business Made Easy, Facebook Pages for Business Made Easy, and WordPress Blog Setup Made Easy.

Blair also educates, trains entrepreneurs and business professionals how to amplify their brand, increase revenues, and raise more funds.

The Race is ON! | PREPARE | Get into the Game and WIN!