A-Train10

Content Curation or Creation?

Aarion Harvey

You have two ways to share effective content to social media. Content can be curated or created. Curated content is “content that you gather from trusted sources relevant to your industry.” Versus created content is “produced within your organization.” But which one works best for your organization and how much of each should be used?

Roughly 60% of the content used on your social media should be curated. Finding trusted sources to share content is important. You want to give your audience messages that have value and are trustworthy in its information. Patrick Armitage describes 10 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs. Of his ten tools, ensuring that your content holds value, is personal and shouldn’t take all day is paramount. The personalized content will create a bond with your audience, your organization and the curator. This is the onset of building trust with your audience. The content you choose to share should be useful to your audience in some manner. And with society’s fast pace life, your content should be a fairly fast interaction. This means a short article, a quick Tweet or a photo that speaks a thousand words.

The remainder of your social media content can be created from within. This content can include blog articles, white papers, infographics, guides and visuals produced by your organization. Your created content is the perfect source for driving your conversation and actionables. In the blog post 13 Ways to Create Content for Social Media That Connects with Your Brand’s Audience there are some great takeaways. Ensure you share positive news and statistics. There is a higher probability of your content being shared if you keep it positive and informative. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Repurpose content you have used previously. Gear your content to be personalized. This will help you connect with your audience and create long term loyalty.

Principles of Online Community Building

Aarion Harvey

December 3, 2021

Creating your online social media community is a crucial component to building your social media presence. An online community is formed from groups of people that share a common bond. This bond is built from an appreciation of your brand, social stance or vision. Any person can become a part of this community. It is important to recognize those individuals that can become quality ambassadors of your brand and vision. Collaborate with an influencer, build your brand advocacy program and build an employee advocacy program are three essential blocks to building your advocacy program.

When attempting to engage an influencer, look for someone that is talking about your product or service on their preferred platform. Research their interests and platforms that they use. If you are looking to make a larger impact on Twitter, find an advocate that has a strong presence on it. You want to create a connection with the influencer or advocate before you ask for their time. Respect their time by not asking them to go all out for you. This should be a mutual benefit. Plan to take some time contributing to their content. This is a relationship of reciprocation.

A brand advocate will spread the news about your organization with fervor. Word of mouth recommendations is one of the fastest ways to promote your brand. When creating your brand advocacy program include four components: Program goals, criteria for selection, a plan for onboarding and a plan for continued engagement. After you have nailed down your four components, create a criteria for identifying your potential advocates. The potential pool of advocates should have relevant content to share that has the eyes and ears of your intended audience. The advocate should have an exceptional reach through their social media. Lastly, your advocates should have a high level of engagement within their community. Once your advocates are selected, ask them to fill out an intake form. These forms will lay out your terms and conditions, mission, mutual benefits and agreed upon contact information. Your intake form will be custom to your organization and needs. Once the relationship is solidified, make sure to check in with your advocate periodically to ensure continued engagement.

Your employees are an excellent trusted source to promote your organization’s initiatives. An employee has the potential to reach over five thousand new people. When setting up your employee advocacy program identify what you hope to achieve and the steps it will take to get there. Attention should be focused on employees that are established influencers. Decide a way to reward your employees for their support. And finally create a plan to track data. Integral data to collect may include: active participants, volume of content shared across social media platforms, and website traffic.

Internet business models have created influence on the surveillance and data mining by using the information obtained to target new and existing customers. Data mining companies gather and analyze data from users homepages, searches and social media to better target ads to those consumers. Advertising has become a default business strategy to support online content and services. This is no different than when advertising became the norm for newspapers and magazines. Businesses will advertise to support specific content and to reach their target markets. Historically it was just knowing who your audience was and what they liked. But it has become a science to mine big data.

Big data has no legal definition. A loose definition could be used as data that is collected and then processed through algorithms and modeling in order to deduce human behavior that can offer predictions. Whether these predictions are for governmental or business purposes it matters not. Data mining and collection has been an ongoing trend since computers and the internet were placed into existence. Hackers were not far behind. Hackers have not only targeted individuals, but they have went after public and private corporations as well as government entities.

A social media consultant should be able to enhance a company's brand management, customer engagement and organizational communications. In order to diligently provide the best services a social media consultant should possess qualities such as creativity, data analysis, communication and project management skills. Creativity and communication skills should be the top two for an effective social media consultant. One has to be able to find new ways to promote their clients and in an effective manner.

In a March 26, 2018 article by Philip Howard and Samantha Bradshaw, Three reasons junk news spreads so quickly across social media, they targeted some important details that social media users face daily. How exactly is junk news spread so quickly? The authors attribute three causes: algorithms, advertising and exposure. You might be asking yourself “how exactly do these affect junk news.” Algorithms are coded to sort, filter and deliver content that will maximize user engagement. Advertising is targeted to deliver micro targeted messages to users by “stimulating outrage, curiosity or both.” As for exposure, the authors state that users expose themselves to information that lines up with their core values and that users also do not want to expose themselves to new radical ideas. Have you ever noticed that you may be Amazon shopping for a particular product, then when you bounce back over to Facebook and are scrolling through, lo-and-behold an ad is in your newsfeed for similar products? Algorithms.

Experience from an Altered Social Media Use Significantly: Blog post

The experiment entailed me deciding not to log on to my Facebook account, Twitter and Instagram for 12 hours. To achieve this, I had to switch off data and ensure that I was only responding to calls or texts from my contacts. Additionally, whenever I was not expecting any message that would push me to check my walls, or messages from such sites, I would keep the phone in silent mode to avoid temptations and it was not easy at all.

In fact the whole process might have been a little stressful, but this was something I was interested and really wanted to keep trying on because as people these are the little things that we don’t really worry about in everyday life or even pay close attention to ,so I wondered what would it be like, how would I feel? Either way I knew that I would be surprised

The first experience I gained of course is that it is not easy especially for heavy users of social media to stay without checking messages. At some point it gets tough because your constantly thinking and wondering what people are saying, or even whose contacting you, did you miss a majority opportunity , I would get tempted to check and confirm these accounts. The temptation was so high that at around the 8th hour I wanted to break the experiment it took everything in me and I was trying , who would thought some so simple as staying away from your phone would be so hard, but since it was for my good, I chose to wait. I felt suffocated. I would feel that I want to ask a person what is going on from their sources yet I was in a experiment so I avoided.

In the reading it spoke heavily on mass collaboration it was also very specific with its types of collaboration as far as social media, the community and its purpose Moneyball Sportswear does a excellent job of utilizing these things with their organization, which explains why their success has grown so much over time. Moneyball Sportswear has a Instagram page where they communicate with their customers and post their customers wearing their outfits and often times promoting new gear for the people to purchase , they’re really good with advertising their products through social media which I think has helped them so much , by even posting some famous people and influential people wearing their gear. Moneyball has also signed a license agreement deal with Michigan state , so they have the opportunity to collaborate with Michigan state and put their logo on the product, Moneyball has also sponsored over several Sports team including both basketball and football and has also collaborated with some high Schools all around the world .