Content curation for social media

How to find blogs that post content relevant to your audience and subscribe via Feedly

You’ve heard about the 80/20 rule when it comes to social media, right? This means that only one out of five posts you make on social media should be about your brand. The rest should be content your customer base or target audience would find interesting. Otherwise you come off like a megaphone constantly yelling about yourself. It’s not a good look.

So you say, okay, I get it. I need to post other interesting content. But how do I find it without spending hours online a day. I don’t have time for that. I’ve got a business to run.

We’ve been there. Heck, we ARE there. We need to find interesting content for multiple clients AND our own social media accounts. So we get it. We know how important it is to have systems in place to save time. You need an easy way to manage content curation for social media. Having a repository of interesting content that’s updated automatically is our essential starting place. So how did we build that?

Set Up Feedly

First, set up a Feedly account. Feedly is an RSS reader which means you can use it to subscribe to blogs or any website that uses RSS to syndicate its content. Which means it will automatically populate with new content as it is posted to the blogs. You don’t have to go check each blog for new content. Feedly also has mobile application versions so you can easily use it on the go.

Find Some Blogs

You have a Feedly account. Now what. We need to find some interesting websites. We need a place to start, so let’s say you are an online store selling women’s cycling gear. Let’s try a search for “women’s cycling blog.”

Oh, look at that. I lucked out. The first result is a comprehensive list of women’s bike blogs, many with location. Jackpot!

Start adding the blogs that look interesting to your Feedly account. Just click “add content” in the upper left hand corner of Feedly, copy the blog url in the address bar at the top of the page and paste it into the box, then click the green “+” to add it to your Feedly.

 

Here you are given the option to add this source to a collection. If you’re new to Feedly you can create collections that make sense to you for filing these sources. Sometimes when you add a source, Feedly will have a pre-checked collection there for you based on the content. Keep it or uncheck it based on your preference.

After you have added a few sources, have a look. This is content curation for social media on autopilot. Now you have one place where you can go and scan articles to see which would be of interest to your customers.

In a follow-up post, we show you how to keep track of the articles you want to share with Pocket and how to space out your posts with Buffer to avoid overloading your social media feed.

Bonus link: if you’ve been using Feedly and want to customize it further, here are a few add-ons that can help you suit it to your needs.