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Social Content Curation, Facebook and Click-Throughs

By On February 5, 2010 · 4 Comments

An underlying premise of social networking is the authenticity and credibility of your social graph. When people who you have networked with digitally recommend information, experience or products, you are likely to lend their recommendations more credibility than someone you don’t know. Facebook and Twitter make this kind of socially-curated content sharing incredibly convenient to do.

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MINOnline shares recent data from Hitwise that shows just how much impact content sharing has. The chart to the left shows the share of click-thrus to news and media sites from Google News and Facebook. Since May, Facebook has increased its share of upstream click-thrus significantly against Google News.

Some of the phenomenon is driven by scale: Google News has about 63 million visits a month, compared to 2.7 billion for Facebook. But more of the phenomenon is driven by the way people use Facebook; according to the company, more than 3.5 million pieces of content — web links, news stories, blog posts, etc. — are shared by Facebook users each week. People are filtering content, and are looking for content filtered by the members of their social graph.

This trend underscores the opportunities for marketers and media brands.

For a marketer, when a consumer has elected to include your brand in their social graph, they will be receptive to shared content. An effective content-marketing program, which attempts to educate, enlighten and entertain consumers about your brand is an effective way to increase awareness and drive web traffic.

For a media brand, the concept of curating content becomes an important component of your strategy for connecting with an audience. People have a large appetite for content; the increase in the proportion of content that they are accessing through trusted connections suggest that people are looking into their social graph to ensure a good content experience. When a consumer includes a media brand in their social graph, they are inviting that brand to help guide their exploration of good content. It doesn’t all have to be original. It does all have to be useful and relevant to the brand experience.

This shift toward accessing content through curated networks will only increase in the future. Media and marketing brands have an opportunity to increase their brand footprint if they become active and useful participants in the phenomenon.

 
  • Anonymous

    Hi Dan, and Good Morning
    Your post touches on several provoking points, but the Business Takeaway for me is, Master aligning content with your core customer base, and become a source conduit via the various social platforms within your Circle of Influence.

    That seems easy enough, but then, not really as so many other objectives begin to surface. For instance, it seems that to be an effective and efficient curator, we have to choose which platforms to aggregate the information to, be it facebook, twitter, blogs. Your Circle of Influence isn’t evenly divided between any of these, like fishing Where the Fish Are. Sometimes I get the most response from a LinkedIn posts as an example, which seem strange to me.

    Then there also seem to be different distribution paths that have different results, such as a direct link to an article on our blog from twitter, verses a direct link on twitter to our facebook fan page,which has a more descriptive outline of the article, with an accompanying link to the blog. While that seems to be a longer path to get folks to the information they are seeking, it also helps build some fans along the way.

    And then there is the balance between original content and repurposed content, which evokes a lot of emotion with the purists folks. I don’t know what that balance is, but for our own apartment blog, it seems like about 1/3 original to 2/3 repurposed.

    The point here being, there seem to be different results based on alternate distribution paths, and other seeming simple adjustments, and they seem to change, which is why marketing sometimes is a mystery I guess. So, we keep practicing,

  • http://www.viralhousingfix.com danielrmccarthy

    Eric: The distribution challenge — how do I get the content I want to share out into my social graph as easily as possible — is a technology-standards issue. For Facebook et al to leverage value out of their audience, they need techniques to keep their audience as organized as possible. Ergo, a walled garden of a certain degree. As a marketer or a media player, you want to assess each potential distribution channel in terms of the scale that you can aggregate and the results that you get from distributing content. The equation would be something like: (Size of social graph on platform/click-thrus)+(Redistribution of links)+(Inbound link recognition by Google)=Weighted value of audience.

    The broad debate across the social media community about “original” versus “repurposed” content defines the content question in a way that is too confrontational, I think. A good example is the Good Reads summary of things that struck me that I do on this blog. I’ve been fascinated by the volume of upstream click-thru’s I’m driving with those posts. People are reading them and clicking through to the articles that I’m highlighting.

    I’m acting as a curator of content that I’m experiencing. I’m applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn’t strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

    That’s the role of curation, and every brand can benefit from it. For instance, imagine posting once a week on your Urbane apartments blog about new reviews of restaurants in the surrounding area. The reviews can come from any number of sources, and you pick out the ones that you think would be the most interesting to your Community. That’s curated content. It’s not original. But it is incredibly useful.

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