Monitoring and curating content is an important part of building a following online. The quantity, and quality, of your following determines how straightforward it will be to find and convert future business. Ideal social media platforms exist to communicate what you find interesting and share them with friends and contacts.

‘Curation’ might seem a curious word to use for the process of collecting quality content – it sounds like something done in a museum or art gallery – but digital curation generally refers to the process of establishing and developing long-term libraries of digital assets for current and future reference.

As well as curating other peoples’ content, you will also be producing your own – blogs, videos, podcasts – but let’s just concentrate on curation for now.

Now for your content reader: there are many news aggregators, or readers, that bring you your favourite RSS feeds from websites, online journals and blogs. I use Google Reader but that’s because I use of lot of Google tools and I find this the simplest solution.

Setting-up

1. Set-up a Gmail account and get set up with Google+.
2. Sign-up for Hootsuite.
3. If you don’t use Hootsuite to manage your Twitter account, then set-up a Timely.is or Buffer account to handle the automatic scheduling of posts.
4. Install the Timely.is or Buffer bookmarklet in your browser.
5. Set-up your aggregator/reader.
6. Add your favourite blogs, news feeds and Google Alerts.

Your morning social media routine

1. Review your reader’s lists.
2. If a headline looks interesting, read the story.
3. If it seems useful to your audience, open it in a separate browser window.
4. Copy-and-paste the URL into Hootsuite or use the Timely.is or Buffer bookmarklet.
5. Edit the Tweet and add a comment/angle of your own.
6. Click the Hootsuite Autoschedule button or the Timely.is or Buffer Add to Queue button.
7. When you have 6-10 posts lined up for the day, leave at that.

Your early afternoon revisit

1. Go to Hootsuite or Timely.is of Buffer and review the performance of your Tweets.
2. If any stand out – with a lot of clicks or retweets – post them to LinkedIn and Facebook via Hootsuite, using the native scheduling tool (your social media accounts should be registered in Hootsuite).
3. Repost them manually into Google+ (as far as I know, Google+ still only allows automatic posting to Company Pages, not individual accounts).

Hootsuite has its own built-in tweet autoscheduler

The logic

Twitter Followers can take a steady stream of posts because they dip in-and-out of their Twitter streams and only catch some of them. 10-15 Tweets a day is reasonable.

On Facebook and LinkedIn, there is a decline in response after 2-3 posts. Do most of your curation on Twitter and let Twitter Followers select the most popular posts for the other platforms.

With two shot sessions in the morning and early afternoon, you are creating a patchwork of useful content and you learn the pattern of follower attention during the day. It gives you some authority on the subject!

This ignores several other issues – your own content from your blog or website, list and Circle (G+) management, your strategic plan – but it is a good routine to be varied for your plan or any other events on the horizon.