Content Marketing 102

Engaging & Building Through Content Curation

Cody Beck

Published in

Social Media 102

6 min readJan 7, 2014

This post is for anyone interested in the strategy behind Content and Social Media Marketing.

I’ve noticed a lot of companies introducing the concept of Content Marketing into their marketing and business strategies. Since I’ve been going through the process, I’ve decided to share what I’ve learned. The following is the strategy I’ve been implementing for a Dublin based ad-tech startup called PageFair. This post is about building a Content Foundation on Twitter by curating content that peaks interests and helps solves problems for your potential customer base, while using six free social media tools.

*Remember- The main purpose of content marketing is to solve your customers problems through informative material. Selling your product is secondary.

This process is done in four stages

Building Lists
Curating Content
Pushing Content
Tracking Progress

Building Lists

The first people to follow are experts or thought leaders in the space. For me, it was accounts like Adage, Advertising Week, and Business Insider.

Next, I’d follow anyone whom you consider a type of competitor. I followed all the major players in the adblocking industry. It’s good to see what kind of content they’re sharing, what problems they’re customers are having, when they make the press, and when they release new info.

The last group of people to follow is who I call “The Admirable”. This is simply people whom I admire on Twitter. These are people I look up to, have the potential to learn from, and whose social media style I like. I followed people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holiday, and orgs like Hubspot, Contently, and ReviewzNTips.

The next thing to do is to organize these groups into lists to make it more realistic to keep up with all the conversations. I use Twitonomy to maintain and monitor my lists. The dashboard offers monitoring of your own account or any other Twitter user, along with lists and any keyword search you want to watch. But for those that get easily distracted, you can use Twitter lists to maintain most of this info- although you do lose the dashboard effect.

There’s so much going on in Twitter feeds that it’s easy to get lost, distracted, and miss out on the valuable and useful information by just using the standard feed. I cannot stress the importance of maintaining lists to keep you organized.

Some examples of my lists include Advertising News, Competitors, Content Marketing, Growth Hacking and Admirables.

Now that you have your lists, it’s time to start finding content.

Curating Content

An easy way to find content is to install an RSS reader. There are a ton of options out there, but I recommend Feedly. It’s easy to use and has a clean UI. Use your reader to mark relevant articles you’d like to read- to both keep up with your industry and to find helpful articles that may solve your customers problems or peak their interest.

I begin by looking for the latest trends or changes in advertising that publishers might not be aware of, as well as any mention of adblocking software mentioned. The goal is to increase the awareness of adblocking while simultaneously offering a solution.

You should also set up TalkWalker Alerts- especially if you’re already creating original content- so you are immediately informed if you make the news or are referenced in another blogpost. It’s also a great way to stay informed about your competitors.

Now that you have gathered your content, it’s time to share it.

Pushing Content

I schedule my tweets using Buffer, a social media scheduling and analytics platform. It’s easier than doing it manually all throughout the day, and it will also give you great analytics on your tweet performance. Buffer’s blog is also an awesome example of content marketing at work.

When starting out, I tweeted at a 6:1 ratio per day. 6 tweets were aggregated news, one was a retweet or a hat tip to another author’s article. If you’re going to share someone’s work, write your own tweet recognizing them. Twitter moves so fast that going the extra mile really helps you stand out in the vast array of tweets. Becoming an informational hub is great, but engaging with others is the best way to truly grow your following.

*Remember- This is one of the most important parts of the plan- engaging with authors. This will also help us further down the road in the content marketing process.

I would then restart the process, except instead of a retweet or HT, I would send out a promotional tweet, offering our free adblocking analysis. I would also A/B test the copy of the promo tweets to see if one was more effective at engaging our audience. Most of these will be ignored in the beginning- That’s okay, don’t get discouraged.

The last step is tracking the success of your tweets.

Tracking Success

Buffer will show you typical stats, such as favorites and retweets, but it will also show you clicks, and the potential audience reach due to retweets. You can also find out what time your tweets tend to have the most success. In the beginning, I received no retweets. and it sucked. It was discouraging. So instead, I started to look at clicks, showing signs of audience interest. I found the commonalities within those tweets, and started pushing out more similar content to improve engagement.

Once you have some content out, you can use a tool called Target Pattern to start gaining more real, relevant followers. Target Pattern helps you gain relevant followers by targeting keywords in tweets and giving you the option to favorite those tweets from your account. It also has analytics that show you how many impressions each word or phase is getting, as well as how many followers you are converting from favoriting tweets containing each term, so you can adjust accordingly. I used a similar service early on to gain followers interested in advertising, adblocking, publishing, etc. I recommend starting a campaign once you have a week’s worth of relevant, targeted material tweeted out.

*Remember- These are real and relevant followers. I do not condone buying followers or acquiring fake followers, but I do advocate using tech to more efficiently find a relevant audience that is interested in the material you are sharing.

Here are just a few quick tips to finish up.

Don’t be a Twitterbot.

It’s important to have something interesting to say. Try changing up some headlines when pushing out others content, turning some into questions, disagreements, or thought provoking headlines. Remember- real people are intriguing, they have opinions and they can be controversial- you don’t have to agree with the major trends. But most of all, just don’t do anything stupid or offensive.

Avoid the Void

My co-worker once told me,

“Tweeting is basically shouting your opinions into a void. You must engage”.

Keep that in mind when constructing tweets. It’s easy to get lost in the noise. Make sure to engage, intrigue, and most importantly help your customers.

Measure

Make sure that whatever you’re doing, you have some sort of goal you can measure. In the beginning, you may not like what you find, but that’s the first step towards making progress- finding a baseline from which you can try to improve.