A study investigating the psychology of social media sharing indicates that people share because they want to make valuable content accessible to others.
When your audience members scrutinize your social media content, they form an opinion about your brand based on what you put out there, and they determine whether to share you content with their own audiences.
The buzz and engagement your Facebook page or Twitter account enjoys in the days or weeks following its launch may die down pretty quickly if you cannot supply consistently high-quality, share-worthy content to your community.
Thankfully, content discovery tools are available to help marketers maintain a high level of engagement on social media.
1. Get content ideas at your fingertips
Content discovery tools suggest content ideas for you to share based on your area of interest, the topics you suggest, and what's trending in your social media circles. You can filter topics based on relevance and time, add custom topics, or explore a certain number of topics related to your niche at different instances to determine which combination suggests the most interesting and valuable content for your editorial needs.
Quite a few content discovery tools are free. Swayy, DrumUp, and Prismatic are three that allow you to sign up with your email, Facebook account, or Twitter account. The free, stripped-down versions allow you to gain a quick familiarity with the tool; eventually, you would want to explore various price plans for access to added features and analytics.
Running out of "how to" blog post ideas for your gardening supplies business? Content discovery tools can open up many useful ideas that your audience of enthusiast gardeners will appreciate. See this image of Prismatic's suggestions:
Want to add your two cents or brand experiences to thought-provoking DIY gardening stories? Sort and peruse popular and highly recommended stories to create compelling gardening dairies or scrapbooks. See this image of Prismatic's "Best of Best" stories:
One of the biggest benefits of using content discovery tools is the ability to instantly access content in different formats. BuzzSumo, for instance, allows you to filter content by articles, guest posts, infographics, interviews, videos, and giveaways. You can keep your social media content mix varied and interesting. Ideas for content repurposing—such as creating a blog post from an infographic or using a series of articles to write an e-book—can also come more easily.
If you think your clients can interpret Big Data trends, impact, and predictions more easily in the form of videos or interviews, content discovery tools will gather the latest and most relevant videos from a broad spectrum of sources. See the image of BuzzSumo's video/interview suggestions and their social media shares:
2. Supplement content creation with content curation
Social media content curation is an essential audience engagement stratagem. Instead of creating content from scratch or repurposing it, you sift, sort, and arrange content that you find online into specific niches and then share it with your communities.
You might, for example, collect top-notch, valuable resources or content all week, and then pick out the most important ones to create a curated list that you can then publish on social media channels. It would save your fans and followers the time they would spend searching online for great content that's of interest to them. You can also include one of your own blog posts or infographics in the list.
Content curation is a key function of many content discovery tools. With Spundge you can discover and organize content into neat notebooks, and add the Spundge It button to your browser toolbar to save useful content from any website.
ContentGems creates interest lists from the keywords you supply, discovering relevant content from thousands of social media accounts and feeds; with content suggestions classified and saved in folders, curation essentially takes care of itself.
For more on curation and other curation tools, see "Curating Content: A Few Principles and Tools to Guide Your Efforts."
3. Glean insights from social media analytics
Some content discovery tools offer analytics that provide a useful picture of your social media interactions and performance. By understanding customer response and sentiment, you can tweak, overhaul, or continue as is with your current content strategy.
Swayy, for instance, provides number of links shared using the platform, number of links clicked, and average clicks per link, and it breaks down stats for individual posts. It also tells you about your trending keywords and most important content types and sources.
Scoop.it's free analytics offers a glimpse into content interaction with such statistics as number of visitors and reactions.
Make content discovery more efficient and lean
Discovering content with traditional Google search or even Google Alerts, for that matter, is a laborious process. The time savings realized with a content discovery tool that matches your needs can be substantial.
Harness the potential of content discovery tools to build a loyal social media community around your brand.
