• Beekeeper Makes Electronic Music Recorded From His Hives to Inspire Love For Pollinator Populations
• Shopify launches Shop, a new mobile app
• Facebook is adding the option to charge for access to live streams
• YouTube brings fact-check panels to searches in the United States

Social media is the game we’re tackling today, folks. And with help from Content Marketing Institute, we’re learning how to use content curation right to drive better results.

Give context to your curation. It’s all about delivering relevant content that works for your audience and your business. 1) Identify why your audience connects with your brand, and 2) determine why your business uses social media.

Let’s dive into effective examples CMI offers:

• Let’s start with a curated LinkedIn post that presents findings from a survey. The author writes a unique intro, poses questions to their community, concluded with their observations, and used a CTA that encouraged feedback.
  • Takeaway: take an excerpt and engage
• This next example post is about giving credit where credit is due. The author is clear about where the info came from and links to the original source in the comments. Doing this builds trust and credibility.
  • Takeaway: attribute properly
• If you have a different perspective, share it. This author tastefully tweeted their alternative viewpoints after reading an article that favored Quora. They sourced the article, gave their opinion, and asked for feedback from their followers.
  • Takeaway: it’s okay to disagree

Where do you go to find content that’s worth talking about?

• Take a look at Twitter’s trends feature to see what’s popular in real-time.
•  Along those lines, SparkToro Trending ranks the most-shared articles on Twitter, shows who is tweeting about it, and points to other content being shared by those accounts.
• Use Feedly to keep up with the content published by the most helpful websites for you.
• CMI recommends Zest to keep up with the latest marketing industry changes.
• Try out the BuzzSumo Chrome extension to judge content based on its number of shares. Hint: Of the most-shared stories, consider which ones will work for your curation.

Smash the button!

Shout out to the Latah County Historical Society! Thank you for sending in your #StaySharp entry and for sharing how your team is using social media to stay connected with your fans.

The Challenge: Like so many other businesses, the Latah County Historical Society closed its doors to help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

The Museum Curator wanted to come up with a multi-headed campaign to keep their audience engaged with local (Latah County, Idaho) history. As a small non-profit museum, this campaign is organic and won’t be boosted by any advertising buys.

The Campaign:

1) To start, LCHS posted historical images of Moscow Homes during lunch across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

2) LCHS then created caption contests using a historical image, and a call for 100-word story caption. These captions are evaluated and voted on to determine a winner who would receive a local gift card in Latah County.

3) Lastly, they plan to post parts of their document collection online taking their followers on a journey that originally took place amid the Civil War in 1864. In its archives, LCHS holds a transcript of an overland trail diary (Oregon Trail) that tells the story of the Lieuallen party as they crossed the plains from Princeton, Missouri to the Walla Walla region, Washington Territory.

The epic migration, chronicled on Facebook & Twitter, starts with the journey itself on April 5, 1864 (but posted on April 5, 2020). It will continue throughout the year, and end on the last journal entry date on December 31, 1864 (to post on December 31, 2020).

To make it easier for folks to follow the journey, they’re using #LieuallenParty on each post and plotted the route on a Google Map. 

Results: LCHS received good responses so far from the early caption contests and lunch break materials!

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E*TRADE has your back when it comes to banking, investing, and financial guidance. Learn how to buy the dips so you don’t accidentally shell out for snacks instead. Still, that artichoke dip looks yummy. Five dollars, anyone? Going once…going twice…