You're probably up to date with all the social media trivia there is to know. You've read the best industry reports and bookmarked those awesome infographics that tell you the right times to post on each social media platform. You already know that Tweets with Photo URLs get 35% more retweets and that Facebook posts see the highest levels of engagement on Fridays. You've even gone so far as to act on these insights, and yet improving engagement on social media seems like an elusive goal.That's because spurring engagement on social media, like most good things in life, takes sustained effort. The content you create, curate and share over a period of time will help you build a community of followers, only if you don't compromise on quality and consistency. Here are a few ways to find and share content that will WOW your audience.

Using content curation tools and RSS readers

Content curation tools like DrumUp and RSS readers like Feedly are great sources of fresh, relevant content. Typically, a content curation and scheduling tool lets you input keywords specific to your line of business and returns content based on them. Such tools help you save a significant amount of time and effort that you would otherwise waste in running manual searches for content that your readers may find interesting.

RSS readers, on the other hand, let you follow specific blogs and sites that you may have already identified for the quality of content they publish. They're also a great way to keep up with the works published by influencers in your niche. While reader apps don't come with the added benefit of letting you schedule posts days in advance, they're still very handy in helping you discover unique content.

Subscribing to newsletters

Sometimes, there’s great content right in your inbox, just waiting to be unearthed. Newsletters can be invaluable sources of content and content ideas since they typically include current industry trends. It’s true that some newsletters can seem spammy, adding little or no value to your curation efforts, but there are several exceptions.

Here a few newsletters you should consider subscribing to:

-Content Marketing: 

- Smart Brief- Moz Top 10- The CopyBlogger Dispatch

-Social Media:

- Marketing Profs- Convince & Convert- Inbound.org

-Technology:

- Re/code Daily- Hacker Newsletter- MIT Technology Review

-StartUps:

- NextDraft- Mattermark Daily- Guy Kawasaki

-Blogging:

- The Skimm- Medium Daily Digest- Sketchplanations

-Graphic/Web Design:

- Web Design Weekly- Sitepoint- Smashing Newsletter

Subscribing to Subreddits

A Subreddit is basically a niche forum for a specific subject, which can be either public or private. Each subreddit is governed by certain rules. Once you subscribe to a subreddit you can contribute to and discuss pertinent topics. Since most subreddits are strictly moderated the discussions are seldom off-topic. There are also voting systems in place by which fellow-redditors can up-vote or down-vote each other’s responses.There are over 1.8 billion subreddits and you can identify the one that best suits your interests through a simple keyword search such as, r/Advertising or r/Socialmedia.

You could use these subreddits to brainstorm content ideas, curate opinion on trends relevant to your business, or even share your expertise on the subject. But here’s some Reddit Lingo you need to get familiar with first:

-TL;DR – Too long; didn’t read

-X-post – a ‘cross-post’ that’s re-submitted to a subreddit after it has already been submitted on another one.

-Repost – any link that’s re-submitted on Reddit

-OC – Original Content

-AMA – Ask Me Anything

That’s only the tip of the acronym iceberg on Reddit – see the full Glossary here.

What’s your take on content curation?

I read somewhere that Content isn’t King, it’s the Kingdom – and if that’s true the smart content marketer would be the reigning Prince(ss). As much as we’d all like to produce more and more original content, curation is inevitable simply because of the operational efficiency it helps us achieve.  So what’s your best approach to content curation?

Author Bio: Vasudha is a blogger at DrumUp, a content curation and scheduling tool. She writes extensively about content marketing and social media marketing. She also loves trying new tools that make social media management less overwhelming.