Knowing what to post on Social Media day in, day out can be tough.

We’ve talked at length about automating your Social media and speeding up your social media scheduling to save time, but those techniques rely on you having great content ready to go. If you don’t, then start here.

The key to any successful social media campaign is fresh, quality content.

You can’t afford to be posting the same generic content on your channels and expecting your audience to want to interact with you and invest in your brand, so it’s essential that you combine your own content with a selection of quality, relevant material from other sources.

In today’s post, we’re looking at some of the best ways to curate relevant and engaging content for your social media posts that your followers will want to interact with and share with friends.

Follow these tips to take your social media strategy to the next level.

Bookmark relevant blogs

Finding blog posts and news articles to share on social media can save you a shed load of time, as these articles can be used to spark discussions and get your customers to interact with you.

But if you only share content and news from a couple of sources, your social media content can quickly become stale.

Indeed, even the biggest businesses with their own content marketing strategies like to share content from other sources to add variety to their social media mix.

See also: How to repurpose and refresh social media content

If you want to curate the best content for your social media channels, then spend some time researching into your industry and bookmarking some of the best blogs.

That way, you’ll quickly build up a bank of valuable resources – and you can check by every now and again to find new content from those bloggers and news outlets that you can share on social media.

You can even make life easier by using the RSS Aggregator extension for Google Chrome.

This tool will allow you to view the latest posts from all of your favourite websites in a Gmail-style interface, which is great for those who are busy and want to grab content as soon as they can.

As well as bookmarking, you should also follow relevant sources, bloggers and industry figures from within your niche on social media.

Not only will you be able to see all of their content as and when it’s posted, but there’s a chance they’ll follow you back and retweet your posts.

Use Twitter to find content

Facebook and Instagram may be the dominant social networks today, but Twitter still remains the most useful for finding and sharing information.

Use this to your advantage to find material on the social network that you think your followers and audience would want to see.

See also: Twitter post ideas for small businesses

If you run a large ecommerce business, for example, you could set up brand tracking on Twitter and get updates whenever someone tweets about your business.

If they share selfies wearing your products, you could use them as part of a user-generated content marketing strategy.

You can also save hashtags and searches on Twitter, which will help you find fresh content at a moment’s notice.

However, always exercise caution when sharing third-party content. Ask for permission before you take an image or video from another user to avoid copyright complaints.

Oh, and one more thing.

One of Twitter’s most commonly overlooked features is Twitter Lists.

You can use them to build your own miniature timelines; you could create a List for news in your niche, for example, so that you don’t have to look out for fresh posts on your main timeline.

Subscribe to Google News alerts

If you’re struggling to find fresh news that your audience would find interesting, or you work in a special-interest industry that doesn’t attract a lot of media attention, then subscribing to Google News alerts will help you to see when a blogger or news outlet posts something you might like.

You can set up as many alerts for your business as you like, and they only take a couple of minutes.

Decide on the keywords you’d like Google to look out for, and whenever a news story, blog post or article is indexed by the search engine, they’ll send you an email to let you know.

Sure, this won’t work for everyone, and in some cases, you might be inundated with news alerts from Google, so be sensible and only set up alerts for things you know you’ll be interested in.

Join Facebook and LinkedIn Groups

Another excellent source of quality content is Groups.

Find Groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, ask to join and become a participant.

The key to finding lots of great content that you can share with your followers is to be an active and engaged member, and ask questions that other members will want to respond to.

See also: An introduction to Facebook Groups

The reason Groups are so popular is because they’re micro-communities, made up of experts and insiders from within your niche.

The chances are that they’ll want to share their own blog posts, discuss the latest news and trends from within your niche, and spark debates.

You can use the content you find on these Groups as inspiration for new material for your social media channels, provided you give the appropriate credit when sharing third-party content.

Steal ideas from your competitors

Curating content for your social media channels can be tough, especially when you don’t know what sort of content your followers and subscribers really want to see.

That’s where your competitors can come in to help.

Look around and see what the competition is doing on social media.

If videos are proving to be popular for one of your competitors and they’re getting lots of engagements, then follow suit and create your own or find videos that your customers will want to watch and share with friends.

We’re not saying that you steal competitors’ content and pass it off as your own on Instagram, but you can use it as a foundation for your own social media strategy and enjoy the foresight of knowing what sort of content is going to be popular on social networks.

If you’re too busy to spend time curating content for social media, then get in touch with the experts at Muffin Marketing today. We offer social media for small businesses, helping to improve your online presence, respond to the needs of your customers and grow your brand.

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