Social Media Primer, pt 3: Feedly

Today we return to the social media primer series. If you’ve missed the previous blogs in the series, I covered the background and why in week 1 and Twitter in week 2. After a break for #ArchiTalks, a recap on Instagram, and a vacation – it’s time to take a look at some of the behind-the-scenes curation (Feedly) and scheduling (HootSuite) that will make the other parts of your social media life easier.

The first step of sharing interesting content is finding interesting content worth sharing (Redundant, I know. But important). If you remember, I mentioned in the Twitter primer the importance of the 80/20 rule. 80% of the things you share should be about people other than you…no one likes Mr. Shouty. Hopefully if you’ve created a good base of thought leaders and industry peers on Twitter or your other social networks, they are providing valuable content that you can reshare. Sometimes it might be an article they found that taught you something so you simply reshare (or “retweet”) it. Sometimes it might be their own content that you found value in and want to share. This is doubly effective because you shared good content and showed an industry peer (and maybe soon digital friend) that you support the things they do.

I also mention in the Twitter primer about creating a schedule of subjects that’s meaningful to you and shared one of my original social media calendars. Chances are, your industry peers aren’t going to hit all of those subjects…because they’re in your industry. That’s okay. You finding and sharing articles shows you have an eye for future trends or are watching other thought leaders. It also helps start to define (and over time, reinforce) your personality online, or your company’s brand. Hint: online and offline should look, think, and act the same.

Feedly

This is where a curation tool comes in. There are a variety of options: Pocket, Flipboard, simple RSS generators, etc. I tested and enjoyed Feedly, so that’s what I’ll use as a basis of curation in my examples today. I only have the free version, but it currently does enough for me. The first, and easiest, step is to add the blogs or websites you already know about. Take a look back at your social schedule of subjects you want to share. What subjects do those sites fall within? You can break your Feedly organization into those. Let’s do a step-by-step:

Towards the top of the left bar, there is a button that says “Add Content”. Click it.

Type in the address of the website you’d like to add, or search through their curated subjects below.

This then takes you to the RSS of their website of the last week’s articles. If you decide you want to add it, click the green “+Feedly” button at the top.

Determine what section it should go in. After you’ve added a couple, Feedly will start guessing and pre-check an option.

And voila! You’ve added a website to your Feedly. (If you have a blog or website yourself, it’s important to add yours. You can catch any RSS or website issues quickly as you’ll see the site how your visitor would see it.)

You can do this for a variety of other blogs or websites as you find them. If you’re looking for new content, there’s also the option of typing in a subect word or hashtag topic and Feedly will return what it thinks you’ll like. You can also go to the page of a site you follow already (within Feedly) and it will give you similar sites to check out.

And so grows the hungry content monster.

I currently follow 164 sources and Feedly says I have 1k+ unread articles (since yesterday). If you’re one of those people who likes to see tickers down at 0, that article count would be overwhelming. The good news is there’s no notifications and it’s all grey. You check the site (or the app) and read at your own leisure.

I mostly use this front section, outside of a couple instances, as a curation of article titles and meta descriptions to skim. If I see an interesting headline, I save it for later. That “Saved for Later” section then feeds my social sharing schedule. There are a couple sites and friends’ blogs and certain residential design sites that are highly visual that I find more worth my time to read immediately and not save because it’s more efficient for me. You may find a different way to use it for your needs after a couple weeks. If you do, come back to this blog or just tweet at me and let me know. I’d love to hear it!

Next week we’ll cover scheduling out all this newfound content to share with your followers. Until next Monday, happy OCD reading!