Post by Adi Englander
Becoming a recognized influencer in your industry takes a lot of effort. You need to listen to and correspond with audience members who have relevant interests. You need to develop a distinctive and memorable brand voice and use it to convey your take on the issues that matter most in your niche, and you need to be generous with genuine insights.
Perhaps most importantly of all, you need to demonstrate that you’ve got your finger on the pulse – that you know what’s happening in your niche at all times. You need to show people that if they want to be in the loop, all they need to do is look at your social channels for the latest links you’re posting.
If you succeed with these tactics, the rewards will be major. You’ll have a zealous following that will gladly purchase your products, and brands will turn to you for consulting gigs, speaking opportunities, endorsements and more.
Today’s thought leaders cannot be successful without smart sharing of great content published by others. Regularly providing powerful, influential and valuable information inspires your audience to trust you and to consider you a go-to resource. Curation is essential for cementing your views, growing your audience, building relationships and expanding your message.
Unfortunately, though, curating can be an aspiring thought leader’s greatest challenge. There are many frustrations associated with curating content, but luckily there are powerful solutions out there. Here are some of influencers’ greatest concerns – and tangible solutions to help solve them.
Challenge #1: Sharing links to others’ sites means losing the audience
This is a common concern amongst thought leaders, since sharing curated content directs users to someone else’s website instead of your own. This can seem on the surface to be a counter-productive tactic.
On the other hand, you don’t want to link to your own pages exclusively, as that would make you come off as selfish and would mean overlooking the lion’s share of important articles.
Luckily, a powerful tool called Start a Fire allows you to add custom “recommendations” to the bottom of each link that you share. This a great opportunity to use third-party publications to build brand equity while also driving traffic back to your own content. What’s more, the tool integrates with the top social media dashboard tools in the business – including Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Oktopost – so that you can easily set your account to include Start a Fire badges on every URL you post.
Challenge #2: Automated curation tools have been known to aggregate low quality links
Who has the time to manually go through all the content aggregators, leaderboards, newsfeeds and RSS readers to find the best third-party content for posting? It can take hours every day, which is why automated curation tools are all the rage.
Unfortunately, however, many tools that claim to find and post the best curated links on your behalf actually serve up inferior quality or irrelevant content. This can be hugely frustrating and a big waste of time – it can do a lot of damage to your brand as an influencer.
Luckily, there are some great newer tools that can solve this problem, such as Crate. In seconds, Crate finds the highest quality content pulls it all in to a queue of suggestions, allowing you to browse through it in minutes so you can pick and choose what to schedule. Of course, it’s still important to somewhat carefully look through the content that the tools recommends and make sure that it’s appropriate for your brand. Still, this is a great way to save time and hone in on the good stuff.
Challenge #3: “Dark social” makes user attribution hard
Nowadays, the majority of peer-to-peer content sharing takes place private networks such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat. In addition, the social media app ecosystem is growing in scope all the time, with APIs making it possible to access our social feeds from any number of clients. Sure, most people use Twitter’s website for their activity on this network, but there are scores of alternative apps that people love too.
Because every network and app handles clickthroughs to web pages differently, it can be hard to measure clicks on these platforms. This traffic is often referred to as “dark social.” One recent study estimated that 82% of social traffic can’t be attributed to any specific referrer. Most traditional analytics tools, including Google Analytics, will simply display these visitors as “direct traffic.”
A big part of being recognized as an influencer hinges on others appreciating the visits you drive to their sites with your posts. Likewise, you’ll want to know which social sharers you should be strengthening relationships with because they’re sending lots of traffic to you.
A great workaround for this is the practice of appending UTM parameters to URLs. These are basically tags that can include any information that you want about the referring network, curator, campaign, media type and more, which integrate extremely will with Google Analytics to shed light on dark social. When a community member clicks on a UTM-enriched link, the tags automatically get sent back to the site owner’s analytics dashboard with detailed information. There are even tools like Effin Amazing UTM Builder, a Chrome extension, that can make appending UTMs a breeze.
Let’s get started
It’s hard for many to justify committing to a program of posting curated content to their social channels when it can be so time-consuming and tedious to gather – and when there are so many pitfalls involved. Luckily, there are now multiple solutions for increasing the efficiency of your curation processes and finding the perfect items to match your audience.
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