Curating content for your network is one great way to provide useful information. Everyone is super busy and it’s nice to have someone else read through all the news and find the really important stuff. For that very reason, content curation is pretty valuable, but can also take a bit of time to do properly. Here’s the method that I use every day which makes it easy to curate great content.
Setup
While you can use other tools for the same purposes, I use Google Reader, HootSuite with installed browser plugin Hootlet, and ShareThis browser plugin. All of these tools are free or have free versions (although I pay for HootSuite because I find it that useful).
Reading & Curating Content
The first step is obviously to read through lots of different content sources and find great stuff to share. To do this, I am subscribed to over 200 websites and blogs. The ones that make sense for you will depend on your audience and industry. Take a look at Technorati or Google Blog search to find influencer blogs in your industry. Look also for websites and news organizations and associations that would be of interest to your audience (remember this is content for your audience, not necessarily for you). The nice thing about Google Reader is you can easily scan through a lot of different sources at a glance. Many sites also provide full RSS feeds, which means you can also read the articles inside Reader.
Tagging Content
When I find content I think I’d like to share, I star it in Google Reader.
By viewing my Starred items in Reader, I can easily see the articles I’ve marked for sharing:
Sharing Content
I click on each item in my Starred items to open them in the original site, and then I click on the Hootlet in my browser bar:
This brings up a smaller window that I can then use to send the link out to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and can even schedule it for the future. I typically read through content in the morning with some coffee and setup some tweets and links to go out throughout the day. Then I can spend time interacting and engaging with people when I have breaks in work (or need breaks in work)
Next, I click the ShareThis button in my browser bar and share the content out to StumbleUpon and Delicious:
Lastly, I click Share at the bottom of the article in Reader to share it out there as well:
By using a few tools and having a process, content curation can easily be integrated into your day and gives you a nice way to provide interesting and useful information to your network. Since you’re spending less time on finding and reading content, you can spend more time interacting and building relationships with your networks.
Thoughts? How do you curate content?
(photo by Friar’s Balsam, on Flickr)