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Tips for Curating Content Your Employees Will Want to Share

If your brand needs to expand its reach on social media—to raise awareness, capture leads, and even make sales—start with your employees. The people who work for you have an average of ten times the connections your corporate accounts have. Encouraging employees to share on the brand’s behalf can dramatically boost your content marketing efforts.

The easier you make it for employees to share, the more likely they are to participate. That means supplying a steady stream of content that is interesting to employees and valuable to your audience. Curating all that content can be a tall order.

Here are some tips and tricks to keep the content flowing without making curation someone’s second job.

Subscribe to Industry News Sites

We all know the value of a newsletter as a marketing tool. Odds are you have one that uses valuable content to entice people to subscribe. Now it’s time to see newsletters from the other side. Look for subscriptions from industry news sites, respected influencers, and blogs.

One potential source of value is what Joe Pulizzi calls “20% sources.” These are sources that may not be dedicated to your specific industry, but will have posts of interest to your customers 20% of the time. Save up a few of those 20% articles and you’re good to go.

Use an Aggregator Tool

RSS feeds are the email marketing of content: Frequently overlooked but amazingly effective. With a good RSS feed aggregator, you can develop a library of useful sites and have their latest updates all in one place.

Many marketers swear by Feedly, a free service with premium features available. In addition to collecting content, Feedly displays share counts for each piece. That way, you can tell which content is more likely to resonate with your audience.

Make Twitter Lists

Twitter can be a good source of content, but it can be hard to find the signal in the noise. This is especially true for marketers. Our feeds can have over a thousand people posting in them—it gets overwhelming.

Cut through the clutter by making a list of people who regularly share interesting content (we recommend @LinkedIn and @LinkedInMktg for starters). Use Twitter’s List feature to make a feed with just those people’s tweets.

Share Content from Customers & Prospects

For people who have a vested interest in the topics that concern your audience, look no further than your customers. Especially in the B2B space, the chances are good that some of your current customers have blogs, news feeds, or social accounts that regularly share interesting content. When your employees share that content, it helps strengthen the relationship while also filling your content queue.

But don’t limit your search to current customers. Who are your hottest prospects, and what are they creating and curating? If their content is good, help them promote it while also feeding your audience’s content needs. You may find prospects turn into customers more quickly with that extra attention.

Follow Influencers on LinkedIn

Each year, LinkedIn awards the Top Voices of the Year to those whose posts have had the most impact. 2016’s list is a great place to start. Follow the top voices in your industry, but also follow a few in tangentially related categories (for the 20% rule).

LinkedIn also maintains a list of official  LinkedIn Influencers. These people have shown a sustained ability to create thought-provoking content that moves people to action. Follow these industry leaders to add more thought leadership content to your feed.

Use LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse collects the most engaging posts on LinkedIn and organizes them by categories you choose. You can download the Pulse app to get a feed of quality content on-the-go. Follow a few influencers and categories, and make sure to like and share quality posts to get more relevant recommendations.

Use an Employee Advocacy Platform

The right platform for your program can make curation a great deal easier. LinkedIn Elevate is the only employee advocacy platform that uses data to deliver the right content to the right audiences. Elevate’s unique algorithms suggest content based on what’s trending by industry, at your company, and at similar companies.

Employees can see the list of content you approve, either on their desktop or the Elevate app. They can easily select the content they want to share, add a custom message, and post to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, all from within the platform.

Content curation is a crucial part of empowering your employees to be brand advocates. Use these tips and you can create an always-replenishing pool of content to pull from.

To learn more about creating a strategic, sustainable employee advocacy program, download The Official Guide to Employee Advocacy.