Content curation is an important part of social media marketing. The idea is to position yourself or your company as a “helpful expert” that knows a lot about a topic, and share valuable information on that topic with your followers. Curation is a fancy word for looking through a lot of low quality junk and identifying those blog posts, videos, images or other content that merit being checked out by your followers.
Here’s how to use Google News as a tool for finding interesting content to learn from and if it’s good enough to share to your social channels to your own followers.
Watch How to Use Google News for Content Curation and Social Media Marketing on YouTube.
Step by Step to Using Google News for Content Curation and Social Media Marketing
First, sign up for or log into Google News at https://news.google.com/. This requires a Google account of course so it’s easiest to do it with a Gmail account. Bookmark Google News, or add it to your Startme page. Google then will show you headline news pulled from various trending sources and you can scroll down the left to see topics such as US, World, Business, Entertainment, etc.
Second, customize your feed. This is a little tricky, as there are two different ways to do this. One way to do this is to click on “Favorites” on the left. Then type a topic that interests you such as “Search Engine Optimization,” “Marketing,” “organic food,” “proteomics” or whatever topic you’re going to monitor for content curation. If a topic is big enough or important enough, it will show as an actual “topic.” Then click “Follow.” This will then appear under the “”Favorites” category on the left going forward. You can follow a topic or a news source. For example, I follow “Search Engine Optimization” (the topic) and “Search Engine Land” (the news source).
Third, use “saved searches” to customize your feed. To do this search in the search box for something that isn’t quite big enough to be a topic. This can be a long tail search like “viral videos” or “memes about social media” or some other long tail topic that interests you and will be good for your curated content. It can even be your name plus a keyword, or your company name for “reputation management.” You then click “save” at the top right. These will then appear under “saved searches” at the left.
Finally, over time, Google will learn what you like, and you can click on the “For You” link at the far left and “discover” new topic. It’s far from perfect but you can use this as a way to quickly browse topics and find content to read yourself and then, if you like it, curate it and post it to your social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
