Dear Radian6,

We’ve been using Radian6 to monitor and respond to brand mentions and share our own content with our community. Now we’d like to start sharing more external content on our brand social media channels. Do you have any suggestions on how to incorporate this into our existing social strategy?

Dear User,

Sharing external content is a great way to provide your community with additional resources that they will find helpful, interesting, or just plain funny, and has the added benefit of taking some of the pressure off when it comes to creating original content. As well, posting content that others have created or shared helps strengthen existing relationships and attract new followers.

Here are some suggestions for how you can make finding and sharing external content a part of your daily monitoring and engaging.

Industry Conversation

If you aren’t already monitoring industry conversation, this is the perfect time to start. Put together a new keyword group with terms relevant to your industry so you can monitor it in a separate stack. Here, I’ve used keywords around restaurants and social media as an example.

You can also use the Topic Profile Trends stack in the engagement console to see at a glance what might be worth sharing with your own community.

Not only will it give you additional insight into industry trends, but there is ample relevant external content to share. Chances are your community members are interested in some of the same content you are, so this is your opportunity to fill that need and become a trusted resource.

Multimedia

Images and videos are always popular when it comes to content and will stand out in your followers’ social media feeds. Create a separate stack in the engagement console for mentions of your brand attached to videos and images.

Do the same for your industry conversation keyword group. You might find some hidden gems that your community will enjoy.

Source Filters

As you come across websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts that consistently share great content, consider creating a separate topic profile with source filters. To illustrate, I created the sample source filter below.

This will allow you to keep track of all your go-to resources within the engagement console, making it easy to share timely content with your community as a part of your daily brand engagement.

These are a few of the ways you can track and share external content as part of your social media strategy. We would love to hear from other brands. Have you used any of the above strategies to find valuable content for your communities? Do you have any other suggestions to add?