How the Very Best Content Curation Is Done on Social Media [SSM002]

What are some of the accounts you love to follow on social media?

For us, Moz’s Rand Fishkin and his enjoyable, educational Twitter feed is right near the top.

Rand shares all sorts of content on marketing, SEO, technology, and startups, and he does so with a fine eye toward curation. Content curation on social media is a great way to provide value to your audience and build your own brand. Rand has one of the strongest brands anywhere on social — 334,000 Twitter followers and an engaged audience.

How does he go about his content curation? How do Moz’s TAGFEE values fit within Rand’s digital strategy? We were lucky to have the chance to sit down with Rand to discuss this and more, and we’d love to invite you to listen in.

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

In this episode, here is what you’ll learn:

Rand Fishkin reveals his secrets to curating the best content from around the web for social media and how TAGFEE (Moz’s core values) plays into everything he does in marketing. Here are a handful of topics we covered that we think will make an impact for you in your marketing:

• The business impact of running a values-driven company (3:31)
• The 4 most essential tools used by Rand to discover unique content and ideas (12:25)
• The future of curate-worthy content [hint: visuals will be key!] (17:32)
• How and why being great at content can help with SEO (20:00)
• How to source ideas from your community for curation and creation (23:48)

3 Content Curation Takeaways from Rand

In Rand’s words …

1. Everyone does best when they have a process and a set of guidelines.

“Hey, just go find some great stuff and share it socially.” That’s way too broad. If you give constraints, “Every day I want you to share five great things that will help this type of person in this industry. Here are the primary places where they’re participating on the web … here’s the news they read, here’s who they are, go share those top five. Publish an article on those top five. Share on social.”

2. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that content is a short-term investment with a short-term payoff. It is absolutely not.

The reason that content can be a competitive advantage is that so many people’s bosses and clients are saying, “Content is really hot. I want you to go invest.” And then two or three weeks later, they want to know, “What have yo done for me?” Guess what. That period of impatience — the expectation that content is going to behave like a paid marketing channel — is folly.

You might start to see a little bit return on investment in 90 days. In some fields, it’s going to take six months for you to be good enough to see any measurable impact.

3. When you are developing your values and committing to them, you need to also be aware that you’re going to have to need to go out and find like-minded people and a like-minded community that believe in those same values.

Those are the folks that your content, social updates, style is going to resonate with most.

It is tough to find that overlap and affinity in shared values. Pay attention to all the communities in your sphere and identify the ones from whom you can feel that clear core value affinity.

Mentionable quotes and shareable snippets

“That participation, that element of not just creating the community but truly being knee-deep in it is what gives you that empathy for your audience in such a way that you could never get on your own. I think it’s is folly to think that as a content marketer or content creator that you can go into any industry and be equally effective. You know, if you told me tomorrow, “Hey, Rand, you need to start writing about electrical engineering, I would say, ‘Okay, give me a year to learn and spend a bunch of time in there, and then I bet I’d be good at it.’ But unless I immerse myself in it, you’re not going to get anywhere near a fraction of what I can give you get if I’m writing about web marketing or startups or technology or the subjects I’m already immersed in.”

Show notes

Thanks a million for checking out this episode! Below are the people, companies, articles, and tools that were mentioned in today’s podcast. If you have any questions for us, feel free to drop us a line in the comments and we’ll respond right away!

People & companies we mentioned

• Moz
• Buffer
• Dharmesh Shah
• HubSpot
• Inbound

Articles & ideas we discussed

• TAGFEE
• Whiteboard Friday
• Moz blog
• New York Times visualization women’s 100m freestyle

Tools we drooled over

• Moz’s Keyword Explorer
• Clickstream
• MozCast from Dr. Pete
• Nuzzel … “to curate my Twitter feed and send me all my links. Make Twitter into an even more useful application to what it already was.”
• Hacker News … “I don’t read the comments, but I do check out the “New” page. Scan through a dozen pages of the latest submissions to Hacker News.”
• Product Hunt … “Find a lot of stuff that I do my social sharing on. A lot of things that inspire me, directly or indirectly. ‘That’s really cool. We could do that in the SEO world, in this fashion.’ Then we try to execute on that.”
• Quora – Web marketing space, questions. Find good topics for content.
• bit.ly/10Xcontent — Rand’s personal swipe file of awesome content. During the show, he mentioned there were 79 links in there. Now there’re 82!

How to say hello to Rand (and us)

You can find Rand on Twitter @randfish. You can get to know his company, Moz, at Moz.com.

Thanks for listening! We’d love to connect with you at @buffer on Twitter or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for

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About the show

The Science of Social Media is a podcast for marketers and brands interested in learning about new and exciting ways to implement social media marketing across a variety of platforms and industries. Join Buffer hosts Hailley, Brian, and Kevan each week as they interview some of the best marketers from brands and businesses that are leading the way in social media innovation and experimentation around the world. We promise to keep it fun, insightful, interesting, and most of all, actionable. The Science of Social Media is a podcast presented by the social media publishing and analytics tool, Buffer.