One of the best ways to offer value to your clients, followers and readers is to curate content by sharing relevant articles from a number of sources.

This is for the reason that modern marketing involves helping your client make informed decisions instead of blindly promoting what you offer.

So, finding content that your clients will benefit from, is the best way to not only be recognized as an expert in your field but also offer answers and solutions that will get them to buy your product or service.

That said, here are 3 ways to speed up your content curation process:

#1: Using the Feedly to search articles

Feedly is one of the best tools to find articles that belong to your niche. The best part about Feedly is the fact that it can be used for the aforementioned task but also organize them into categories. All you need to do is set up an account using your Gmail address. Based on your search, the site will return a number of blogs or websites that will give you the articles you’re looking for.

#2: Use the IFTTT method to collect articles

If you want to save a number of hours, then the If This Then That (IFTTT) tool will help you do so. Since this process helps you automate a number of tasks, all you have to do is create a recipe after opening an IFTTT account. All the articles that you want will be populated in a Google spreadsheet.

#3: Choose and curate content

Once you find the articles from the spreadsheet, you can go through them after which you can decide which ones are suitable for sharing. What you can do is write a status update as to when you will post these articles on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. As for Facebook, you can use the Scheduling tool so as to post them regularly.

2013 was no stranger to changes. Not only was visual marketing a big part of the change that took place in social media but also monetization.

Now we are in 2014, and there are another sweeping set of changes that are bound to occur.

Here are 3 social media predictions for 2014:

#1: Pay to play

Facebook has recently changed its News Feed strategy in order to switch from organic reach to paid search. Google+, in turn, has introduced ads while Twitter is now a public company that will have to find a way to drive revenues. So, it’s clear that a number of companies will feel the pressure to pay in order to get more visibility for their content.

#2: Strategic Refocus caused by Facebook

With the way Facebook has changed the algorithm to suit paid search, small businesses as well as not-for-profit will have to incorporate other ways so as to market their content. This include opening a blog, using email marketing while creating content that is useful.

#3: Developing A/B Testing Tools by Social Networks

The launch of A/B testing tools for social networks which will be not only for big brands but also small ones will ensure the distribution of quality content across these social networks. for the ones that do manage to successfully manage these tools, an increase in a number of statistics such as impressions, website visits and engagement will leads to more conversions and sales.

Google has definitely made it much harder to rank naturally via SEO. Not only their algorithms have become much better at detecting unnatural links and SEO tactics, but also the layout of their search results have changed so that there are more components resulting in natural results to go lower. For example, if you type general business category and a city name, you would most likely see a mix of 7 results from Google Local. You may also see other components such as shopping feeds and news that further push down the natural results.

The success for an SEO campaign should not be measured by having #1’s but should be measured on overall visibility and traffic to the website. SEO should be done not only for the website, but also for your social media sites and youtube videos.  The more content you can get in the search engines the better your results will be. Sometimes youtube videos or social media content may rank highly for your keywords, which may result in traffic to your site.

If you are a local business, you have to also optimize your Google Local profile and get as many reviews as possible. Local SEO has its own techniques, so make sure to higher someone that knows how to do this or do further research if you are going to do it yourself.

If you aren’t able to create a social media strategy for your business, thanks to the lack of data or for any other reason, all you have to do is spy on your competitors.

In all probability, they have already done most of the hard work, and all you need to do is do some research on their social media plan in order to come up with yours.

So, here are 3 ways by which you create a social media strategy of your own:

#1: Compare audience size

First, find out which social networks your competitors are on and one can easily do this by checking the links to social media profiles at their website.

#2: Measure engagement

Of course, it’s not about the number of fans or followers your competitors have but how they engage with these people. There are a number of reports that help you to do so namely such as Simply Measured, Facebook Competitive Analysis Report, Twitter Customer Service Analysis Report, Google+ Page Report and Instagram User Report.

You can get an in-depth analysis of the engagement they enjoy in the form of graphs and numbers and so on and so forth.

#3: Check profile setups

The final step to analyzing the competition is by looking at how they’ve set their profile up while also looking at how they make up of components such as cover photos, descriptions, Links as well as the posts they make and the responses they get.

So, what makes a content marketer successful?

It’s a question that can be answered in a number of ways, from situation to situation. However, there are certain trends that most more-than-successful content marketers practice, and so here are 3 of them:

#1: Place someone in charge of marketing content

It’s a known fact that 73 percent of B2B companies have someone in charge of their content marketing strategy. Out of this, almost 86% of the most effective content marketers have had someone responsible for marketing content.

In fact, experts believe that the reason why content marketing fails is because there isn’t a person who owns the responsibility of ensuring that your content marketing goals are not met. It usually does not have anything to do with not having any interesting content as an organization in the first place.

#2: Have a Clear Content Strategy

It’s a given that most effective content marketers have a clear content strategy. What this should tell you is that you cannot be successful unless you have a clear content marketing strategy. For this, you have to write down your goals (in other words, document them!) and make sure that every person involved with content marketing understands the documentation.

#3: Use a number of Tactics

It’s a known fact that the most effective marketers use at least 15 tactics while the effective ones only use 10. Since it is all about maintaining interest and engagement, creating content that really works towards this goal is important.

And in order to do this successfully, you have to use a number of tactics – probably cost-effective ones at first, and then others within the constraints of your budget.

Today, consumers are cleverer than ever. While businesses used to manage their reputation with the help of advertising, they’re now discovering that word-of-mouth advertising is on the upsurge thanks to virtual tools such as social media and native review websites. The following article will take a close look at the best used practices of social media and describe how they could aid any business to recover its reputation.

Twitter

Twitter is an effective tool which allows businesses to manage the conversation as it relates to them. When a business creates a fresh post, or a tweet, its followers see it instantly, just like a press release. One disadvantage to such instantaneousness is that if a business makes a tweet which it regrets, for example a violent tweet or one which imprecisely defines a product or its cost, the damage will already be done. At such point, the lone option should be damage control, which normally will not be sufficient to keep a company’s reputation undamaged. For such reasons, numerous companies favor not to risk creating a reputation-damaging blunder and instead prefer to outsource.

Facebook

Facebook is another useful tool for establishments as it allows a business to link with its greatest loyal consumers, who select to like their respective pages. Businesses could use their Facebook page in order to post videos or pictures of fresh products, and even share info about how the enterprise supports the public. However, companies must check their page frequently. If a possible customer asks any question on the business’s page and doesn’t receive a speedy response, research have revealed that they’ll start losing interest in dealing with such company. Furthermore, former consumers could use a business’s page to post criticisms or info which damages the establishment’s brand. A business should constantly monitor its profile in order to ensure that its reputation doesn’t take a smash. As most companies lack enough time, familiarity or resources with social sites in order to monitor their profile, they regularly outsource such task to a well-established online reputation management company.

Additionally, there are much more social media choices available for businesses in particular industries. Nevertheless, a weakly managed social media account is likely to do more damage than good, just like undesirable content which spreads on social websites in order to damage the establishment’s reputation. In order to keep from ruining its status on various social media websites, a business must hire a well-established online reputation management organization.

A number of businesses are already utilizing the power of Facebook so as to sell their products and services.

If you have a small business of your own, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use this social networking site to do the same.

That said, here are 3 ways by which you can use Facebook to sell your product and services easily:

#1: Create a Landing Page app

The first step is to create a Facebook page (not profile!). Next, you can either use a third-party landing page app to create the store or even sync a store with Ecwid’s or Store Ya’s Ecommerce widget.

#2: Promote products or campaigns with your timeline photo

Another simple way to promote products is by changing your timeline cover photo to that of the product that you intend to offer. But that’s not all – include a link to the product at your website in the image caption so that your fans can visit and possibly purchase the product as easily as possible. Of course, you can continue to promote the product by sharing a link in the status update section as well.

#3: Share product links in status updates

While it might be the most glossy way to sell your products on Facebook, it definitely works provided you display a product with a link. For this, all you have to do is post a link to a product as a status update. In fact, post a deep link to get your customers directly to the product rather than just reaching your website. Also, use the embedded posts feature so as to embed your public Facebook posts outside Facebook.