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 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 key words 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 can get distracted by click bait articles.
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 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.
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 a customisable news feed which takes sources you trust and filters them using key words 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 use a select list of Cronycle sources to start a ‘trusted library’. If you don’t already use a news aggregator or twitter to search for articles then this is the best option. If you already have a curated list of trusted sources which you search through then take the other option.
- Join your Twitter account to Cronycle to see all the articles the people you follow post through Cronycle
- With a Standard Account – you can 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.
- With a Standard Account you can add Google Alerts to Cronycle – so instead of searching Google News, go to Google Alerts. 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.
- Hit ‘Create New Collection’ – type in a list of keywords which you would like to be present in the articles in order for them to be relevant for your social media channels. 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.
- Add articles to the relevant boards as they appear in your news feeds or using the Content Clipper on your browser or mobile device
- When you’ve established it’s a good article for social, then hit the three dots and click ‘share on social media’. You can either take the link to post on your scheduler, or post them right away.
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, for internal knowledge, and some financial analysts use us to keep up to date with oil prices. 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.
The Cronycle Standard Account
We’ve mentioned a Standard Account. The Standard Account allows you to further personalised your news feeds by adding bespoke sources to your library. It’s incredible value for the amount of time you save.