How To Find Great Content to Share

Sandra Giffin

In this age of social media it is essential to have a presence or you won’t exist. You need to attract followers who share your interests. And to get followers you have to contribute something of value that goes beyond you and your business.

Social Media is a big party. Here’s how to be a good guest:

• Don’t Talk about Yourself and Your Business all the time
  
  
  
  • if you only promote yourself and your business you will become a social pariah
    
  • promote yourself and your business no more than 20% of the time
    
  • you may think you are fascinating but after a while everybody becomes boring

• Develop the Art of Small Talk
  
  
  
  • participate in conversations with other guests
    
  • show an interest in people

• Be Engaging
  
  
  
  • share good content
    
  • give people something of value

My favourite Social Media “party” is Twitter.

I have mentioned in other posts, how much I love Twitter.

Six months ago, I did not have a Twitter presence. Today I have thousands of followers and I have been added to many lists.

I tweet about startups and the entrepreneurial experience. I regularly receive DM’s from people who tell me how much they like my tweets.

I enjoy content curation and I have a natural talent for it. But I have taught others the process of content curation so it is something everybody can learn.

My Sources for Great Content

• Flipboard is a like a news reader but in magazine format. You follow topics or people of interest to you. It is a rich source of content. It’s free.

• Content Gems monitors over 200,000+ news sites, blogs and social media accounts. It allows you to select interests and then choose keywords to monitor. You can receive your results in a daily email digest. You can follow 2 interests with 50 keywords per interest for free.

• Scoop.it crawls more than 25 million web pages a day. You choose a topic and keywords and it gives you suggestions. You can also add your own sources. You can receive your suggestions in a daily email digest. You can follow 1 topic for free.

• Swayy lets you connect your Twiter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Swayy analyses the content you have posted or shared, how your audience has engaged with it and what your follower’s interests are. It suggests topics and retrieves content for you to share in your personal dashboard. You can set up one set of social media accounts in one dashboard for free.

• Feedly is a newsreader that lets you add RSS feeds for blogs, publications, or YouTube channels so you can monitor them all in one place. You can search for topics and keywords to discover content to share. It’s free.

• Spudge let’s you search for content and organize it into notebooks. You can share content on your social networks. The basic version is free.

• Paper.li allows you to create your own newspaper from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or web content. You can also search for papers created by others on topics of interest. You can search for free and create papers for free.

• MondoPlayer is a mobile app exclusively for video. It helps you find videos from sites all over the web, preview them in a continuous stream and share them on social media networks. Free and Pro versions (Full disclosure – this is my startup.)

Do you have any favourite content sources?

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