I wanna share with you the ways that I am collecting, organizing and sharing information for our various media properties.
Obviously, there’s workflow around getting content from writers or creating content yourself, but a lot of what you’re going to do is just curate content from other places.
I showed you in a previous video how you can find Facebook events, but the reality is, for whatever audience you’re targeting, there are lots and lots of different content sources.
You should keep an eye on these sources and try to find good content that you can leverage in one way or another for your properties.
So, I’m just gonna walk you through the tools that I use.
Facebook is obviously a place where a lot of different articles and videos are shared. I would highly suggest that you follow pages of any topics or any content creator that’s directly relevant to the audience that you’re going after.
From those pages, you’re going to find good content that you can share in your Facebook page or maybe even embed into a blog post.
The nice thing about Facebook is they have made it easy to save content that you’re interested in keeping on hand.
- There is a button on the upper right corner of the post where you can click to save the post.
- When you’re on a mobile phone, you will see a bookmark where you can click and it will automatically save things for you.
You will then have all your saved posts up in the ‘Saved’ section.
The good thing about saving something on Facebook is that you can then easily share it to a page that you manage.
Looking at the image above, from the saved posts list, you can click ‘share‘, then right up from the post you will see the dropdown where you can do the following:
- Share on a page you manage
- Share to a group
- Share to an event
You can do whatever you want to do but most likely, share on a page you manage.
It will pull up the different pages that you have and then you just grab your page, do your comments and do your post.
As an example, LaDainian Tomlinson, a very famous San Diego football player, has his hall of fame speech came through to my Facebook feed. Such an excellent piece of content for me to able to share in ThereSanDiego website.
So, Facebook is really a nice resource and they make it pretty darn easy to make use of post and content that you find there.
Feedly
Feedly is for those of you who may be familiar with Google Reader in the past.
Feedly is now the dominant feed reader for essentially anybody who is publishing content.
They typically have an RSS feed and this tool picks up on this RSS feed and pulls in any new content that has been published on a particular media property. It will then pull it into one interface for you to be able to see it all.
Essentially, what I do is I organize a variety of topics that I am interested in – which is so very easy to do in Feedly – and I then add various website feeds into that topic.
For instance, if I’m looking for San Diego related news, I will just click on San Diego news and then I can just hustle through the list and see if there’s anything that I am interested in sharing or do anything with.
If I were interested to do something, I would add an item to Read Later.
Read Later is where I keep the stuff that I’m actually interested in.
By doing that, it allows me to batch my work and then I mark “Read” the ones I no longer want so that they come out of my feed and will now be gone. Once something is in ‘Read Later’, I can decide what I want to do to it.
The easy way is to actually click the article, open up the article and then in the article, you can see there is a number of different options.
My current workflow in almost all cases is that I will then save it to Pocket.
So pocket is my preferred app for actually consuming content.
- It is a little bit prettier than Feedly.
- You can watch videos on it
- You can view images on it
- You can get all kind of different type of content in here
It is a little prettier than Feedly when it comes to presentation. It is great on the mobile phone as well.
For actually consuming content, I ultimately will move things over to pocket and consume them. Once I have found something in Pocket that I really wanna share, I will mark it as a ‘favorites‘ by hitting the star at the bottom.
Anything that is marked to ‘favorites‘ syncs up to my Goodbits automatically.
So, I’ll mark anything that I want to be in our newsletter as a ‘favorites’ and then I will go and sync Goodbits with Pocket. it will pull in my favorites so that I can then easily share them in my newsletter.
If I want to do something else, I can hit the share arrow and you can see it gives me a variety of options: Twitter, Facebook, Buffer.
Buffer
Buffer is what I use if I have all kinds of different Facebook pages and groups. If you are a member of various groups, you will see a piece of content that I share because I feel like its appropriate to everybody.
That’s what I’ll do, I’ll load stuff up in the buffer and share it that way.
I use Buffer less and less now, just workflow-wise, but it’s still a great tool to have especially if you’re looking to share a bunch of things with a bunch of different groups and pages at once or if you wanna have a queue of activity.
The one thing that I will say is that I have heard though from lots of people that Facebook penalizes the distribution of post that comes through automated posting tools.
I don’t have data to be able to prove if that is correct or not. But I have heard that from numerous sources that are pretty qualified to have a background in the topic.
So, almost all the Facebook post that I do now, I just do manually on Facebook.
Later
Later is the app that I’m currently using to manage posting to Instagram as well as to Twitter. The reasons why I’m using Later specifically:
- nice and easy to use
- nice and easy to use on mobile
- easy to use on desktop
But there’s a number of different tools that I have recommended for Instagram that do that. They’re as good and easy as well, but with Later:
- It is both mobile and desktop
- It’s got the ability to work with team members pretty darn easily
I can have team members that are logged in, contributing, adding content and sharing content pretty darn easily on Later. When it comes to grabbing content that I think is interesting for Instagram and then scheduling that content out into the future, I will do that on Later.
So those are really the apps that I’m using to curate content as well as Goodbits.
These are the apps that I’m using every single day. Between Facebook, Feedly, and Pocket, that’s probably 90% of my curation and content consumption and organization practice right there. My workflow are those 3 apps.
Something to think about
I hope that’s helpful for you. There are certainly other tools that do the same functions and I think its a matter of finding the ones that you like best then finding ones that will allow you to have the workflow that is convenient for you.
For instance, technically I can do everything in Feedly that I can do in Pocket, except Pocket syncs with Goodbits easily whereas Feedly does not.
So, that’s a big reason why I would then save things to Pocket from Feedly then go from Pocket favoriting it into Goodbits because Goodbits is such an important tool to me.
Just looking for those key integration and key workflow that makes your life easier can be super impactful on your process and just a lot of it to get much, much more done.
