If you’re an entrepreneur or a small business owner you’ll soon realise one thing.
You need content to share with your audience to demonstrate value.
There are essentially two different types of content you can use to build your brand, and that is
cur-ated content and cre-ated content.
Curated content:
Curated content, is content you find that’s relevant to your message, your brand and business (ie. don’t just post any old post on your business Facebook page as it can become spammy.) Think of it as you’re an owner of an art gallery, and you’re creating what you want to go inside the gallery. What kind of feeling do you want people to have, how do you want them to interact, and how can you help them have an experience that’s more likely to get them to feel a certain way?
Created content:
Created content is just what it sounds like, anything you write or create yourself. The benefits being that you can stamp your website or business name on the image and so if people do re-share it, you’ll get the credit, and you’ll be getting your messages shared with a larger audience. One downside is that it does take more time to create so mixing in some curated content is a good idea, it’ll save you some time but also you don’t want to just share only your own articles all the time because for one it’s too time consuming but 2, it’s not so incestuous.
Here are some examples of curated content:
- Instagram images from someone else’s feed (you can do this by making a screenshot when you see something you like, and crop it in the Instagram viewer when re-posting and always make sure you credit the original owner & ask permission)
- Re-sharing blog posts on your Facebook business page
- Sharing someone’s Linked In post, blog post, or video
- Using Pinterest to curate images and things you like, that you can share with your audience (beware, you can’t take images from Pinterest and put them elsewhere. For example, you can’t pull an image from Pinterest and put it in your ebook without asking permission)
- Asking someone to do a guest post on your blog, that ties in with your messaging
Here are some examples of created content:
- Graphics you make yourself (you can use an app on your phone or something like PicMonkey or Canva)
- Photos you take with your phone (and edit with Instagram, Photoshop app or VSCO for example)
- Blog posts (just like this one I’m writing and you’re reading right now ?)
- Live streaming – Periscope, Facebook live (to use Facebook live use your phone, and go to create a post and click the ‘Live video’ button)
- Telling written stories with just text on any platform, Twitter / Facebook / Instagram
- Sharing more of an in-depth look at your life with personal details about your day with Instagram stories or Snapchat
So choose what style of content you’re going to curate, and make sure you aren’t just re-sharing only other people’s stuff. After all, we want to hear what YOUR opinion is, it’s one of the reasons people will be following you in the first place.
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If you feel like your brand is feeling a bit disjointed I’d love to chat to you. I’m offering free 20 minute Brand Audits so if you feel like you could use a little bit of insight from a designer (that’s me!) and some swift advice to head you in the right direction I’d love to hear from you. Just head here, fill out the short form, book in a time that suits you and I’ll speak to you soon.
