3 Ways to Rack Up Social Media Content

Before we start on content, I want you to get familiar with the 80/20 rule. It’s a best practice on social media, and it’s one you should pay close attention to. Ready for it?

20% of the content you share should be your own. 80% should be content from OTHER PEOPLE. Yes. You read it right. I can feel you asking me why this is the case, when the whole reason you’re even ON social media is to promote your own business.

The reason is because social media is social. And nobody likes the person at the party that does nothing but talk about themselves without letting anyone else get a word in, or without asking any questions. Social media success necessarily involves good social media citizenship, which means sharing content.

Now that we’ve learned and accepted the 80/20 rule, you’re probably wondering where you’re going to find this content. Here’s the answer.

1) Social media itself: One of the best places to find content is on social media, though you’ll need to do a little legwork to get to the right places. The best plan of action here is to make a Twitter list of accounts that frequently share content relevant to your line of work – these will be experts, trade publications, etc. You can find these accounts by doing a search right on twitter.com.

2) Google Alerts: Pick three keywords for your business. Head to google.com/alerts and set up a daily email alert for those three terms, as well as your business name. You’ll now receive a daily email digest with tailored articles to these terms, perfect for sharing. Note: These articles will typically be from higher end news publications, not smaller blogs.

3) ContentGems: This is one of my latest finds and it’s been incredibly useful. ContentGems is a news aggregator by subject matter. You can set various interests, and enter key words for each interest. For example, in my “Starglass Media” interest, I’ve set the keywords of “social media,” “twitter,” and “facebook,” since I focus on sharing social media news.

Once you create an interest and put in some keywords, you’ll receive a daily email summary with relevant, popular articles for social sharing.

The three locations I’ve listed should give you more than enough for scheduling posts on each network every day. Bonus points for giving the author of the article a shoutout to build your following and create engagement!

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