The following is a guest post by Jack Humphrey. Jack is an online “social engineer” and content marketing specialist.  He is the co-creator of CurationSoft;  content marketing software designed to save bloggers and social media experts valuable time curating great content.

Marketers are in a constant state of confusion over just how to work social media to build their following and, ultimately, their brand. We see examples every day of people missing the mark in social media.

They get impatient and use their stream to flat out advertise. Then they get disillusioned when the results are flat. They see people building successful brands, like Mari Smith, and they miss the key difference between her success and their lack thereof.

Here’s the difference: People like Smith, Scoble, and Kawasaki do a great job at bringing new ideas and valuable content into their streams which is relevant and useful to their readers. And at a very high ratio compared to updates they make which directly affect their “bottom line.”

They essentially curate great content for their followers which is relevant to their followers. Kawasaki is a “general interest” social curator. Scoble is a tech curator. Smith is a curator of things helpful to DIY marketers.

We follow them because they help us filter the news we’re interested in, but have no wish to research ourselves. They are our eyes and ears on topics we care about. And we trust them to bring the goods so we don’t have to stress about missing vital information.

This is what a good social media curator does. And it is how one becomes very popular on social networks. When you find and post a great piece of content, and it gets shared by your followers, you get in front of their followers. Every time this happens you pick up new followers who will share to their followers and so on.

This is how brands get noticed in the social world. This is how daily, direct traffic from social networks can be increased. By systematically sharing well-curated and researched content, you become a resource that followers cannot afford to lose track of.

Simply sharing other links that have already been shared on the network isn’t quality social curation. That is for the masses to do. A good social curator finds new content to post from outside the network through tools like RSS readers and aggregators used to deliver and organize vast amounts of content around their topics of interest.

The latter point is what makes all the difference between a normal social media consumer and a thought leader like Kawasaki. Social thought leaders are conversation starters. They are the ones everyone else shares, likes, and retweets.

Your mission for the week: discover and share new content relevant to your market on your favorite social site. Start more conversations and grab more following through the activity that’s generated by your thoughtful curation of news and ideas that turn your market on.

Have you found success with content curation? If so, what particular activities were especially helpful? Leave your comments below.

Photo Credit: Get Curata

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