Social Media Content Curation Using FeedlyYou’re a business owner and you have a business to run. However, creating content for Social Media is important, if you have the right sales infrastructure in place! It’s sometimes a distraction to focus solely on content creation when other pressing business management and marketing matters are at hand. So, what’s the savvy business owner to do?

Curate the content in between the original content you’re producing! Thankfully, there are tools that can really help you out here. And the one I’ll be detailing today is called Feedly.

In this article, I’ll explain to you what Feedly is, how to set up a Feedly account, and how to effectively use Feedly for Social Media content curation.

1 | What Is Feedly? | Social Media Content Curation Using Feedly

Feedly’s Welcome page says, “content you need to accelerate your research, marketing, and sales.” It is known most broadly as a feed aggregation service, or feed reader, but it’s really much, much more.

In other words, Feedly allows you to centralize content (not just from RSS feeds) from around the Web to a management dashboard. Among the many abilities of Feedly is that you can look for blogs, podcasts, and even keyword search results, follow these content sources and they’ll automagically appear in Feedly whenever new content is published.

This is great for being not just efficient with your time, only visiting the content sources you trust, but also by aggregating your own content to review how and when it’s being seen by your target audience.

Now that you know what Feedly is, we can proceed to setting up your Feedly account and dashboard for effective Social Media content curation.

2 | Setting Up Your Account on Feedly | Social Media Content Curation Using Feedly

To start, visit Feedly and click on the button to “Get Started for Free.”

From there, you’ll be given an option to connect through various user account services. (If you have G Suite, I recommend that you use the “Continue with Google” option. But, you can sign up for an account using whatever means you’d like.)

At this point, you’ll be introduced to the Boards feature (above). This is a way to organize individual stories (articles or episodes) from your content sources into your own categories. I encourage you to have several large categories (I call them “themes”) for you to post. These can be according to your product or service lines, annual seasons (summer, fall, winter and spring), peak seasons for your business, different target audience personas, or otherwise. This allows for a healthy mix of your marketing content. We’ll come back to Boards later, but since it shows it to you here, I wanted to explain it.

Next, click on the Settings option, which will place you in the account management dashboard. You should see eight boxes that cover different settings. I suggest that you click on each one consecutively and see what options are available to you. You can tweak the Feedly settings to suit most of your preferences and this is where you’ll do it. Many times people give up on a tool because they simply haven’t properly walked through the tool options plainly given. Feedly is powerful, but it’s many settings need to be understood. Invest the time here and it will pay off in greater quality and quantity of curated content, a less frustrating user experience in Feedly for you, and increased productivity overall.

You’ll want to install Feedly on all your mobile devices on which you work. You can capitalize on small moments of time in between meetings or while waiting on line at the grocery store, where you can do some Social Media content curation. You need to make and find time to be more productive, and mobile apps give you that flexibility to curate for and engage with your audience from almost anywhere.

Feedly’s Pro Features

As you’ll see in the screenshot above, when you setup your Feedly account, there is a Pro version of Feedly and it provides a wide variety of fantastic additions to the software. In Part 3 below, I’ll presume you’re using the Free Version of Feedly, but I thought I’d cover some of the paid Pro features in case you were interested.

(In honor of #SBDCDay 2018, we held a free Webinar, Social Media Content Curation Done Right, where I show you how Feedly integrates with other Social Media tools for content curation.)

With Feedly Pro, you can mute terms so that you don’t have to see them in your feed. For example, say you are an entomologist and have a search for “beetles” as one of your sources, but you are plagued by getting Volkswagon Beetles showing up in your feed. Well, you can filter out “Volkswagon” and “car” to eliminate most of the chatter that is invading your Feedly account. On the flip side, you can sort all stories by popularity with Feedly Pro so you can share the content that has already proven to be highly shareable.

Feedly recently introduced Leo (an artificial intelligence bot that you can teach to do filtering of conversations so you don’t have to) along with a feature to subscribe to newsletters that will get captured in Feedly instead of your email inbox.

In addition, you get tight integrations with automation tools such as IFTTT and other productivity tools such as Hootsuite (Social Media dashboard) and Evernote (powerful, integrated note-taking software).

As I said, Feedly Pro is not necessary to do content curation well, but they offer some nice add-ons and if you want to support the team for doing a great job, the paid plan sends a nice thank-you message.

3 | Using Feedly for Content Curation | Social Media Content Curation Using Feedly

Add your first content source to Feedly, add it to a folder in Feedly, then set up your first board. Each folder should also be a board.

Next, search for content sources for each of your business’s categories (themes) and when asked, set up its respective folder and board. Selecting content sources is probably the most important part of using Feedly for Social Media content curation. If you know the blogs, podcasts, news media, and keyword terms you want as content sources, great. Add those and you’re done. But, if you don’t know, then it’ll take some for you to search in Feedly for reliable content sources. You want these to be great sources as this will be the base for content curation. Notably, you can unfollow any content source at any time if you find them to be inadequate for your content curation needs.

Once completed, you’ll have your content sources (feeds) in folders and you’ll have matching boards below in your Left Panel of Feedly. You are ready to start curating content using Feedly in the three steps below.

Step One

On a regular basis (every morning) or when you have spare time, visit Feedly. Click on a specific folder or the “All” feeds folder and peruse the titles of the stories in your Feedly. When you across a title that interests you, click on the star and add it to the appropriate board. Do this for as much or as little time as you have available. Once done, continue on your merry, entrepreneurial way.

Step Two

Whenever you want to share content to fill in your Social Media feeds, you can hop into Feedly and browse to your specific category board. You now have a select few stories that are things you know will interest your target audience. Read the article, listen to the podcast episode, or watch the video, and determine it’s actually of interest to your audience, and doesn’t say anything you’d regret having shared. You will want to click on the article, episode or video title and it will launch it in a new Web browser window (either on your desktop or mobile browser).

Step Three

Once you’ve found a sufficient content piece to share, you now have it open in your browser to copy the link and  share it through your social network profile of choice, or via Hootsuite or another Social Media tool to send it to multiple profiles at once.

At first, it can be tough to get your head wrapped around the process, but once you find the right times you’ll settle into a good routine for sharing curated content in between your original content you’re producing. I hope Feedly proves to be a useful addition to your business productivity tools to make content curation successful in your marketing efforts.

Do you have a question about how to make Feedly work for content curation? Let us know (contact us) and we’re always happy to see if we can help. (No technical support questions, though, please. The Feedly team provides a knowledgebase for Free Plans, and as a Pro user they are responsive and capable of helping with technical support issues.)

Social Media Content Curation Using Feedly

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