It’s Not About You
Is your social media content all about you? All about your business and why people should buy your product or service? If it is, this article is going to attempt to get you to change your mind.
Imagine you’ve just arrived at a party. You go in, and see a few people you know. You greet them and have a little chat. They introduce you to someone new. You tell them all about yourself. And some more. And some more. They can’t get a word in edgeways. It’s all Me, Me, Me.
That’s not sociable behaviour is it? How would you feel if you were that new person? Pretty miffed I bet. You’d think they were self-centred & selfish. And if they then tried to get you to buy a product? No chance.
Why Do People Buy?
Buying is often an emotional decision. We buy from businesses we know, like or trust. If we’re buying locally, we might ask on a local Facebook forum for recommendations. If we’re buying from Amazon, we check out the reviews. If we’re buying online we almost always research first.
So if that person you met at the party did give you the benefit of the doubt, and did their research on you, what would they find? If the answer is a succession of Facebook posts selling your products, that isn’t going to give them the confidence to place an order with you.
But if they found some interesting blog content relevant to their possible purchase, some articles relevant to your problem or interesting to them in some way, and an engaged community on Facebook who obviously consider you an expert, that might push the sale in your favour. Good reviews on Facebook – even better.
So Why Curate Content?
To Engage your audience.
In the same way as the eyes of your new friend at the party would begin to glaze over if you just stood there talking about me, me, me, so you need to bring some interesting stories to your social media accounts. The key, as always, is to know your audience. If you know the kind of subjects they would be interested in then you can post interesting and stimulating content to draw them into a discussion – preferably between them and another customer, for the purposes of the platform algorithms.
Every time you look for content to curate, you need to consider if your audience would find it interesting. Would it spark discussion? Would they click to watch the video? Would they share it? Would they tag their friends? On Facebook especially this kind of engagement, but particularly back and forth conversation, is vital for the algorithm to show your posts to your followers.
To Keep Up With Market Trends.
Spending time finding content to curate is inevitably going to mean that you are reading lots of content and information relating to your industry. This has the additional benefit of keeping you up to date and helping you to sound like you know what you’re talking about when it comes to the next benefit of content curation.
Monitoring all of this content also enables you to spot market trends, to find out what your competitors are doing and what media are saying about you, your competitors and your industry.
To Show Thought Leadership.
As already mentioned, people like to buy from those they know, like or trust. So how do you gain their trust? By providing them with the answers they need to their problems. And in doing so, you show thought leadership. If you provide people with the answers they need, the next time they have a question, they will go to you.
So, along with producing your own content which answer’s people’s questions, curate other great content and add your own slant on it when you post it.
To Add To Your Own Content.
And to stop you having to constantly write blogs!
Unless you have a large team, there’s a limit to the amount of content you can write while still being able to run your own part of the business. The solution to this is content curation. Or rather, quality content curation. And there are various tools available to help you to search for the good stuff.
To Increase Brand Awareness.
It might sound a little odd to say that curating other people’s content increases brand awareness. But if you are monitoring mentions of your brand by other people, and sharing that content as part of your strategy, then they are doing the selling for you. Your brand gets all the benefits of thought leadership without seeming salesy. Once again you can put your own slant on it, but without being overly promotional.
I hope that has convinced you either that you’re doing a great job with content curation or that you need to post less of your own promotional content and more content that’s useful to your audience.
If you’d like to discover some tools to help you find useful content to curate, have a look here.
And if you’d like to read more about what kind of content to post on your channels have a look here.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article, you can drop me a line here.
Lastly, if you’d like some inspiration on creating or curating content for your social media channels, why not join my free Facebook group here.
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