Curating & Creating Social Media Content

As a social media community manager I’m constantly on the web curating content or researching the next tweet or blog post and finding great content the client has failed to tell us about. Now I’m not talking about the Nikes, MacDonald’s and Starbucks but you’d be surprised how many of the world’s top brands haven’t quite grasped the concept of social media internally yet. Social media is a hungry beast and people require new content all the time. Creating that content can rack up quite the bill, but you can also learn to curate it with some internal help by looking at the other departments in the organisation.

Now what big brands and organisations are failing (yet also starting) to realise in the new social media day and age is that you don’t have to spend massive bucks on things like Facebook advertising to produce great results. Part of the work we do here at ISM involves a lot of science and innovative thinking to do with mapping communities and curating the content brands already have.

The biggest thing brands fail to realise is that they’re sitting on a gold mine of brilliant social media content just waiting for a community manager to curate it. Want to know where it is? Knock on the PR and Marketing department’s door and you’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Part of our work is now explaining to the client that we need access to their Marketing , PR, Customer Services and R&D departments because this is where a lot of interesting work is already going on that will inevitably make great social content. Taken a few HQ quality photos of your new product? Great! Let’s put it on Facebook (Curating) Sponsoring an Olympic athlete? Great! Let’s tap into their Twitter community (Curating). You have an event going on in Italy about the classic nature of your brand? Great! Let’s go get some video footage and live tweet! (Creating)

The reason you hire a social media agency is because they know what they’re doing. Letting them into the whole mix could just be the best thing your brand can do right now…

Written by Hannah Burnett-Kirk