Hootsuite recently introduced a feature that recommends content for you to publish based on topics you regularly post about.
If you're not happy with the topics that are automatically generated based on your past social activity, you can manually adjust them.
Further to recommending content, this feature also automatically recommends a time of day for the content to be published, and will make numerous recommendations for each day of the week.
Theoretically, one could schedule 35 posts for a given week in about 30 seconds.
These features certainly will make it easy for Hootsuite users to fill their social feeds with content, but just because it's easy, doesn't mean you should use it.
Before we get into some of the pitfalls of automating content curation, I want to make it clear that I'm not picking on Hootsuite - there are many automation tools available - and it is ultimately the user that is culpable for any negative results.
Following are just a few reasons why you may want to resist the lure of automating your content curation process:
FOCUS ON QUALITY VERUS QUANTITY
While I'm all for maximizing the efficiency of social media marketing efforts, your focus really should be on the quality of the content you publish, the interactions you have with your audience, and really every aspect of your social marketing. And let's face it, tools like this aren't built to optimize the quality of the content you share on your social channels, they're designed to help you publish a certain quantity of content.
EMBRACE THE FULL BENEFIT OF THE CONTENT YOU SHARE
A tremendous benefit of sharing on social media is that you get to personally consume some amazing content that people are publishing as part of your curation process. Sure, not everything is amazing, but when you find an absolute gem, it can be a tremendous learning opportunity. There's even much to be learned from less-than-stellar content. By simply hitting the 'publish' button on content suggestions, you'll be forfeiting these amazing benefits in favour of filling your feeds with miscellaneous content that didn't enrich your knowledge in the least.
THE CONTENT YOU SHARE IS A REFLECTION OF YOUR BUSINESS
When you choose to share content on social media, it instantly becomes a representation of your organization. As a business or brand, you should take great care to preserve and enhance your reputation, and shouldn't take careless risks by sharing content that you haven't read, and aren't familiar with.
BLASTING OUT LINKS ISN'T VERY SOCIAL
If your content strategy is overly dependent on blasting out links that are recommended to you, it will be difficult to engage in any conversations related to the content you are sharing, or invoke your audience to behave socially with your business. Sure, content publication is an important aspect of experiencing success on social media, but without an element of sociability you're effectively rendering social media a content publication platform, which is kind of missing the point.
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I hope I've made it clear that I'm not opposed to curating content on social media. In fact, I think there is tremendous value to be offered by carefully selecting articles, videos, tweets, photos or other updates that will be of great meaning to your community.
The trouble is that there are so may platforms at our disposal that severely mitigate the potential value of content curation - for you and your audience - that all these tools effectively do is create more noise to compete with on the social web.
How do you curate the content you share on social media?
What tools do you use to collect the content you consider for sharing?
What are the requisite qualities that a piece of content needs to exhibit for you to consider sharing it?
It would be great to chat with you more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial