How Flipboard kick-started my content sharing process

When I started my business, I read tons of information about posting to social media, curating content and writing blog posts to promote my business. I felt overwhelmed and more than a little apprehensive about it all. Even now, I am definitely no expert.

I knew I couldn’t write a new blog post of my own every day. Heck, posting a new one every week felt ambitious. So, I needed to create a process to find curated content I could post on the days of the week I didn’t post my own blog articles.

But, I wasn’t sure how to do that. The web is a massive place. How would I find useful, relevant content for the audience I was targeting? Lucky for me, I already had an app for that.

Flipboard to the rescue

I realized I had put an app on my phone a while ago called Flipboard. If you aren’t familiar with it, Flipboard is basically a news app that curates content from all over the internet. You can break down the content into categories by selecting from a list of pretty much any subject you can imagine. Click on the category and get a list of recent news, articles and blog posts on that topic.

This app changed my life as far as finding content. I can find relevant articles for my daily posts in no time. I search for content while riding in the car (when someone else is driving, of course). I search during commercials while watching my favorite shows. Whenever I have a minute, I look for great stuff to share.

I use categories I think my audience (business owners and marketing directors) will be interested in. My category list includes entrepreneurship, success, productivity, marketing, branding, blogging and lots more. I can pile up plenty of material from the categories I’ve selected.

Now, you might be asking where I keep the articles I like and want to use. Ready for this?

I put them in my Pocket

That’s right. In my pocket. More specifically, my Pocket app.

This thing is amazing. Completely simple, but also super useful.

Let’s say you find something on a website, or on an app like Flipboard, and you want to save it. I used to print that page to a PDF. Well, as you know, the pages don’t always print all the information in the same way you see it on the screen. Annoying.

With Pocket, when you find a great piece of content, you just save it to your Pocket from any device. It will update automatically across devices. You can use tags to create categories, keeping it neat and tidy.

You can also follow other Pocket users to see what’s in their Pocket. I don’t use this feature myself, but it could be interesting for some.

The next step: a little Buffer

Now I have interesting pieces of content saved in my Pocket to be used for social media posts. I need a place to schedule social media posts so I don’t have to handle it every single day. Most of us just don’t have time for that, me included.

I turn to a tried and true app for this part, Buffer. I find this app mostly easy to use. I can send content from my Pocket directly to my Buffer app. I have to pay attention to the time of day I do this, though. I’ve had content post immediately instead of being able to schedule it because I didn’t pay attention to when my posting times were set in Buffer.

I set up social media postings on Sunday mornings. It takes only about 20 minutes if I haven’t picked content from Flipboard yet. If that content is already comfortably sitting in my Pocket, it could only take me 10 minutes. I can spare that much time.

Buffer allows me to schedule my posts in whichever social media platforms I choose. I can write my own comments about each article, and they flow through for each platform. Super simple. Just how I like it.

The process simplified

Is that process easy enough for you? I hope you can see a path to quickly curating great content to share with your audience on social media. It’s helped me immensely. I save time and frustration. What more can you ask for?

Do you have a process or app you like for curating content and sharing it on social media? Tell us about it! Maybe you can help other content curators make their process even better. Drop your comments below to tell us all about it.