Content Curation or OPC (Other People’s Content)

So the social media experts will all tell you that to grow your audience, you need good content. But it takes time and research to produce good content. Without an audience, how do you warrant spending that kind of time?

Or maybe you simply struggle on a weekly or perhaps daily basis to come up with ideas for things to tweet, write about on your blog, post to your Facebook page, share as a LinkedIn update, etc? Have you considered OPC (Other People’s Content)?

Providing valuable content doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got to create it all on your own! It’s really all about posting stuff that interests your audience – regardless of where it originated!!

So where can you find OPC?

Google Images: Google anything with “quotes about” in front of it and you will find a wealth of content to post on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Now select the ‘Images’ option in Google search, like this:

Example: I have a client who specializes in custom chocolates.  Doing a Google image search for ‘quotes about chocolate’, I was able to find these:

Photo Credit: Creating Space Yoga	Photo Credit: Polyvore	Photo Credit: Purplle	Photo Credit: Walls That Talk

 

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Huffington Post (and similar article-driven sites): Plug a search term related to your industry into the search box and see what you find!

Example: Using my custom chocolate client as an example again, I searched and spotted this gem in the top 5:

On the same page, regaled as a ‘similar story’, was this beauty:

Huffington Post makes it very easy to share content, with the Share (Facebook), Tweet (Twitter) and Pin It (Pinterest) buttons in abundance!

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Your social media feeds: Sharing from your own feeds on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is as easy as…

Disclaimer: I am not suggesting that you ‘steal’ OPC and then try to pass it off as your own.  Always always ALWAYS credit your source, even if you’re not republishing a piece of content in its entirety (when you simply click share in a social media application, your source will automatically be credited…I’m really talking about copy & pasting here).  If you’re not sure how to properly credit others whose content you’re sharing, there is an excellent article on Hubspot.