Episode 14: Curating Content for LinkedIn

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of making Sales Social Live! Where today, we’re going to talk about curating content for LinkedIn.

Bill McCormick 0:41

So. Hi, Bob. 

Bob Woods

Hey, Bill. 

Bill McCormick

Hi, Brynne.

Brynne Tillman  0:44

Hey, Bill!

Bill McCormick 0:45

So, curated content. So what is it? You know, when I think curate, I think of a museum, you know, like the curate of a museum or to curate, but when we’re talking about content, what curate means, is the definition when you curate something is to collect, select, and present information or items such as pictures, videos, music, etc. or I’ll say blog posts, for people to use or enjoy, and here’s the key, using your professional or expert knowledge. So it’s just not posting something out into the atmosphere, we want to use our professional expertise or knowledge when we’re curating right, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman 1:28

Absolutely! And you know, it’s interesting, because often as business development or sales people we share content that we want to share. Sometimes it’s original content or sometimes it’s our industry content but what we don’t recognize, is that, is not necessarily the content that will attract, teach, and engage our targeted buyers. So, curating content is a big deal because we need to create a followership of people that are prospects if we’re doing this for social selling, right? And so, sharing the right content really means a lot. So, we’ve talked a lot in the past about social listening. So, once we’ve identified what it is they care about, what kind of content they’re engaging on, we can now go out and find content about their industry, about their clients industry, about topics that, not necessarily have anything to do with what we do, however, it needs to lead to our solution. So there, it has to be relevant in some way, that resonates and can start a conversation that will lead to us talking about industry insights, once they’re interested and open, right? I think curation is absolutely critical but it takes a lot of time for a lot of people to go out and find the right stuff, but Bob, you’ve got some tips on what people can do to make curation a little bit easier on a consistent basis.

Bob Woods 3:09

Yes, so I mean, to go back to Bill’s museum analogy, think of the internet as a museum. Now, the internet is obviously a whole heck of a lot bigger than a museum but then think about, you know, all of the areas within a museum that they curate. So, like, in an art museum, they may focus on one artist, or one subject, or medium, or that type of thing. When it comes to curating content, you can kind of think of it in the same way. So, you don’t have to look all over the internet because that’s just impossible to do. So, what you do is, you could go to say, The Feedly Room. So, feedly.com brings in all types of content, and you can then organize it into subject, topics, whatever you want to. So then, when you go in, you can have curated articles in there, that Feedly automatically curates for you that you can then put out to your specific audience, of the people you’re trying to attract, and the people with whom you want to start conversations.

Brynne Tillman 4:15

I think this is a huge tip, Bob. Feedly, I think, is totally under leverage, right? So Feedly allows you to, as Bob said, search specific topics and subscribe to bloggers, and video producers, anyone that’s putting out content, and it feeds you in real time the newest articles or the newest posts so you do the work once.

Bob Woods

Right.

Brynne Tillman

And as Bob said, you go in on a daily or every other day, or every three days and you are; “okay, I wanted to share content on XYZ topic”. You now have the newest, freshest, best content, well, maybe not best, but newest, freshest content at the top of the feed, and it also allows you to bookmark. So, if there’s a lot of content that you like in there, you can bookmark it, so later on when you go to “read later”, is what it’s called, you can see everything that you’ve liked and, whatever mood you’re in, then, you can then go ahead and share that. So, I just wanted to add that before we go to the next thing. Alright, so what’s the next one, Bob?

Bob Woods 5:30

Let’s talk a little bit about Google Alerts. So, when you go to Google to search for something, you’re going out and pulling information from Google. That’s probably a good way to think of it. With Google Alerts, you’re entering in keywords, and topics, and things like that, so that Google then pushes it to you. So, you can set up alerts for any types of content, a lot of what Brynne just said applies here too, and then you can have alerts sent to you daily, or as published, or whatever, and then you can use the content that’s being pushed to you from Google, in your curation for shares, to again, get that audience that you want to bring into you.

Brynne Tillman 6:16

That’s awesome. Bill, is there anything else you do for content curation?

Bill McCormick 6:21

One of the things that I’ll do is I’ll find magnets, right? So, people who are not only in my industry, but are selling to, maybe, the same personas that I’m selling for, that create a lot of content. So, what I’ll do is I’ll go look through their feed. One of the great things is when you go to the activity section, and you click on their posts, so you’re seeing all their posts in chronological order, what I’ll do is, I’ll go up and I’ll bookmark that page so that I can come back, so I don’t have to search for Larry Levine’s profile every time, and then go to his activity section, and go to his posts. I can just click on the bookmark and it takes me right to that activity section and that’s another great place for us to curate content. But here’s the thing, remember, when we’re curating content, we’re just not resharing that post, and that’s it, and so many people do that. I kind of think that’s like plagiarism. You know, you’re just using somebody else to put some stuff out there. You want to make sure, like I said before, it’s using your professional or expert knowledge. So, what can you share about it, If you read a blog post about, you know, the “10 best things that every small business owner should do before retiring”, write up a little bit about, you know, grab a quote from it, and this is what I got from it, and you know, we talked about attract, right? So, that content is going to attract them but what are the other two things? Teach them, so, “what can you teach them?”, and engage them in social media. Don’t forget to be social, just don’t post and ghost. Make sure you come back to that, and you engage with that. So, I think that those are important points.

Brynne Tillman 8:01

I love that! Go ahead, Bob.

Bob Woods 8:02

Yeah. When you do that, one of the big things that we talked about with anything with content is building thought leadership. So, when you are making your own comments on someone else’s content and sharing it, you are promoting your own thought leadership as well. So that, in the mind of your readers, you are becoming more and more of the go-to expert in your field. Whenever they have a problem they’ll think, “Oh, yes, someone just, you know, Bill just posted on this. I think I’ll ask him about this”. That’s what you want. You want to become the thought leader in your industry. So that means you should know what you’re talking about. Good salespeople know what they’re talking about. Why not let other people know, that you know what’s up?

Brynne Tillman

I love that!

Bill McCormick 8:52

Yeah.

Brynne Tillman

I love that!

Bill McCormick

It’s all about building credibility.

Brynne Tillman and Bob Woods

Yes.

Bill McCormick

To be the credible person, you know, I came to a point in my LinkedIn training career, where I needed help from another LinkedIn trainer, and there was this person named Brynne Tillman, who posted a lot and she had a lot of credibility in my book, so guess who I reached out to? That’s the idea.

Bob Woods

Leadership.

Brynne Tillman 9:12

Yes! See guys, it works!

Bill McCormick 9:14

Yes, it does.

Brynne Tillman 9:16

The last thing I think we should talk about, which is totally underutilized from a curation perspective, is hashtags. 

Bob Woods

Yep.

Brynne Tillman

Right?

Bob Woods 9:25

Yeah. Just thought about that. Yep. Yeah, absolutely.

Brynne Tillman 9:29

So, hashtags we use to be found, but let’s use hashtags to find!

Bill McCormick

Yes. 

Brynne Tillman

So let’s, when we do our social listening, one of the things we’ve talked about is to identify the hashtags that our clients are using, or following, or you know, the content they’re engaging on, what hashtags were used. These are now hashtags we can click through to or look up to find more content using that topic, that will most likely resonate with the people that have engaged on content with that hashtag in the past. 

Bob Woods

Absolutely.

Bill McCormick

It’s like a circle. 

Bob Woods

Yeah, it is.

Brynne Tillman

It’s a flywheel.

Bill McCormick

It is.

Bill McCormick and Bob Woods

It’s a flywheel.

Bob Woods 10:10

That’s better than a circle. Yeah, cause the motion keeps going and it builds, and it builds momentum too. The more you put into it.

Bill McCormick 10:19

And if you’re not sure what hashtags you should be looking at, just put a hashtag in front of some keywords that you would use on your website or that the companies that you’re researching would use on their website. That’s a good place to start for hashtags.

Brynne Tillman 10:36

There’s also, we recommend you check out Andy Foote, “F-O-O-T-E”, on LinkedIn because he does research on hashtags. If you look at his posts and articles, I’m sure you can find it there, or just reach out to him and tell him you saw, you heard about him here and get a copy of, I would say probably twice a year he puts out a report on how well hashtags are doing and how many followers they have.

Bob Woods

Yeah

Bill McCormick 11:05

I think it’s like the list of the “Top 100 tags” on LinkedIn, and so, that’s a great place to start. 

Brynne Tillman 11:12

Yeah, absolutely. Well, is there anything else we want to say about curation and curating content for LinkedIn?

Bill McCormick 11:18

As the prophet Nike said in Nike 1:1, just do it.

Bob Woods

Just do it.

Brynne Tillman 11:23

Two quick things. One, make sure that you are looking at company pages as well, right? Of influencers. So, Bill talked about having a magnet or an influencer on content. Look at companies that are in your industry or your client’s industry that have content, for sure. That’s probably a good place to curate content. And a big one is YouTube! There’s so much great content on YouTube. We can curate from there too. 

Bob Woods 11:53

Yeah, yeah. And people still love videos. I mean, if they’re watching this or they’re listening to this, I mean, that’s a, I think that just proves it.

Bill McCormick 12:03

Alright. Well hey, listen, thanks so much for listening and we will see you next time.