How to Consistently Curate Quality Content for Your Feed

Publishing content consistently across your social media channels is important, but so is the quality of content you put out to the infinite space that is the Internet. Your ability to create high-quality, engaging material has never been more important – your social media accounts are the world’s first impression of your brand. Do you want to look put together and professional, or like you rolled out of bed, smelled the first shirt you saw on your floor to see if it’s clean, and ran out the door?

Here are some tips to make sure you’re always armed with great content.

 

Develop a Strategy

The first thing you need to do is decide your posting strategy – including frequency, ratio of unique content versus shared content, and platforms you want to use. All of these factors will vary depending on your business, budget, and what you are trying to accomplish.

As a general rule, the more often you post, the higher your engagement will be and the faster you will gain followers. It seems like common sense, but you’d be surprised. Make sure you find a balance between oversaturating your followers’ timelines and staying top-of-mind, though this will vary between platforms. On Twitter, for example, you can get away with posting much more frequently than you can on Instagram. Think about these nuances when developing your strategy. How often do you like to see posts from your favourite brands on Instagram: once a day, or eight times a day?

Just like you need to find the perfect balance of posting too much versus posting too little, you also need to decide how much original content to create for your social media accounts (photos, graphics, videos, blog articles) and how much you are going to share from other sources. Again, this ratio will change with each platform you use. On Twitter or Facebook, it is much more common to share other people’s content – the platforms are designed for it. On Instagram, not so much. This will influence the frequency of your posting as well: don’t post on Instagram every day if you don’t have good content to post.

 

Find Sources for Shared Content

Don’t scour Google every time you’re trying to come up with a new post. When we’re looking to post shared content on social media, like articles from other sources, we keep a list of relevant websites to check first for each of our clients. There’s no point in walking around the entire grocery store when all you need is milk.

You also need to make sure you are pulling pieces from reliable sources. Remember in school when Wikipedia didn’t ever count as a source you could use for your essay? The same rules apply in the real world too. Make sure you share information that is accurate, on brand, and not offensive. Read over every article before you post it, and read through an overly critical lens.

This is also where user-generated content comes in handy. Do you have an engaged audience? Show off their work! Not only does it take the pressure off of you to constantly create, but it also encourages others to create work as well.

 

Create High-Quality Content

Here’s the hard part. To have a quality feed, you need to create quality posts – whether that’s blog entries, photos, videos, graphics, or ideally, all of the above. To keep your audience engaged and interested, you need to create a variety of content. How fast did you unfollow that girl you went to high school with who only posts selfies of herself? Probably the second you got your diploma. Once your followers realize your posts are all the same, they’ll get bored and hit unfollow.

A tip to ensure you always have content is to always keep creating as a priority. Take lots of photos, jot down ideas for blog entries when you think of them in the middle of the night, create another video when you find yourself with time to kill. Prioritizing content creation will help make sure your reserve of posts never runs dry.

 

Learn How to Repurpose Content

Do you get the impression that major brands like Sephora hold an expensive photoshoot every day so that they have material to post? No chance. Brands plan regular shoots throughout the year and keep the resulting content in their back pockets, doling it out post by post until the next shoot. Take some detail shots, some wide shots, some shots with a human presence – mix it up!

You can also repurpose your blog posts by sharing them on multiple accounts (with different captions to keep your audience interested), creating graphics with key quotes, and making infographics. And, you can turn your videos into blog posts, GIFs, and photos. Content creation may seem like a pricey, time-consuming endeavour, but you can stretch the material super far if you learn how to reuse it. Plus, it gets your work seen by more people. On average, 50% of articles get shared eight times or less on social media – that cuts pretty deep after you spent hours writing, editing, and producing visuals. Squeeze every last drop of creative juice out of your big creative projects, and you’ll have content to spare.

 

Looking to take your unique content to the next level? Check out our post on how to take better photos.