How to curate quality content for social media (without photos of cats).

The constant need to feed your social media marketing machine with new content can be tiring.

Create original content, yes, but also become an expert in curation (Sharing great content that other people come up with saves you time and energy). And if you only share the best, helpful content, people will see your business as a content curator with great taste and good info.

That's when your business becomes a destination on social media feeds, not a distraction.

Curation made easy with targeted searching on Twitter

Use free services like Tweepi or ManageFlitter to do in-depth, targeted research for content. (Note: these are not affiliates, just quality services.) Both accomplish the same thing, but they have different interfaces. The two search functions explained below are free in Tweepi, but for ManageFlitter you must upgrade to "pro" to have access to both of them. That being said, we're including both services so that you can compare the sites.
 

Targeted research on Tweepi

Sign up, go to your Dashboard, look under the column "Follow New Users."
In that list of features you can use either "Tweet Search" or "User Search" to do your high-powered research.

With Tweet Search, you're able to search every recent tweet in Twitter's database for any keyword or combination of keywords you want.

With User Search, you can search the Twitter bios of users, which is helpful if you're looking for a certain kind of influencer first, and then looking to see if they have any great content you can share (i.e. if you want to find other CEOs or managers in your industry or a related industry).

Let's try an example using the Tweet Search feature. You search for the keywords "tips on social media marketing." Every recent tweet that has used some or all of those words will appear before you in a list with the content of the tweet so you can quickly scan all of them to look for something of high quality. To the left of each tweet you can also see the person who tweeted it. Hoorah! You now have a long list of possibilities for high-quality content.

TIP: To find the better stuff more quickly, click on the heading "Follower Count" at the top of one of the search result columns (to the right of the column that lists the tweets). This will order all results so that the tweets from people who have the highest follower counts appear first. While quantity doesn't always equal quality of content, you're more likely to find good content from influencers who have in-demand voices for that topic.

To find these search tools in ManageFlitter, go to its "Search" tab and you will find two similar tools.
 

Free Content Discovery Tools Like DrumUp

DrumUp is a service designed exclusively for this purpose. It is a powerful content curation tool that finds quality content from multiple sources online based on the keywords you enter.

It’s also quick and painless when you're ready to share content - share directly to your social media pages, or schedule your posts to be published at a later date.

Thoughts or questions?

We hope this article has given you some ideas on how you can get better content, faster. If you use any other tools for your content creation, we would love to hear about them via Facebook or Twitter.