How To Curate Content for LinkedIn: Handpick Your Next Post

June 7, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

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What’s your favorite museum? Whether it’s art, history, or ice cream, the draw of going to a museum is to look at the exhibits and artifacts on display. But how does the staff decide, out of tons of pieces in the collection, which to show for each exhibit? They do this through a process called curation, and it’s not just for museums. Marketers, especially social media marketers, use it daily to get people to visit their profiles and browse hand-selected content. Today we’re tackling how to curate content for LinkedIn with topics like:

What Is Content Curation for Social Media?
Why Should You Curate Content on LinkedIn?
6 Steps To Follow To Curate Content for LinkedIn

What Is Content Curation for Social Media?

Content curation involves searching through existing content online to find information in your industry that applies to your target audience. Content for curation includes anything from blog posts to videos, podcasts, infographics, and even eBooks. The type of content isn’t as important as its relevance to your industry and value to your target audience.

Anytime you use a share, repost, or retweet feature on a social media platform, you’re also curating content. You’re sharing something from an outside source, or one of your former posts, and recommending it to your audience by adding it to your feed.

Why Should You Curate Content on LinkedIn?

The minds behind LinkedIn market it as a professional social media platform. That means people are more likely to head there to find industry news from reputable sources. It’s a helpful tool to get in front of your target audience where they spend time. But having a social media presence for your business isn’t always easy. It takes time to build the space, maintain it, interact with your audience, and share content.

Depending on the size of your marketing team, you may not have one person assigned to just LinkedIn duties. You may have one social media manager for the entire company, or you may not have a dedicated social media person at all. These marketing channels are all about timeliness and trends. The lifespan of a LinkedIn post is about 24 hours. This means to appear consistently and stay present on your follower’s feeds, you need to make at least one post per day.

That’s a lot of content to create, and you have to do it fast. Using curation allows you to supplement the volume of content you have to create on your own by pulling from outside sources or repurposing your brand’s old content. But saving time isn’t the only reason to curate content for your LinkedIn feed. Some other benefits of content curation for social media include:

Reinforcing a point you made or a message you shared in your own content with resources from other industry thought leaders or pieces from your archives.
Introducing your audience to other reputable sources to create more of an industry community within your LinkedIn company page.
Increasing audience satisfaction by recommending content they want to read in a sea of other irrelevant pieces on their feeds.
Building trust and relationships with your audience to expand your followers’ list and encourage people to return to your LinkedIn page and other resources for quality content.

6 Steps To Follow To Curate Content for LinkedIn

Use these steps to create a content curation process for your LinkedIn page:

1. Consider Your Goals

Why are you curating content for LinkedIn? What value does this social media platform bring to your overall marketing strategy? Your motives for using LinkedIn play a role in the type of content you look for during the curation process. If you’re looking just to pull in traffic, you might look for trending content. But that’s not always the best strategy. Traffic is only good if it translates into qualified leads, conversions, and sales. If it doesn’t, then views are just a vanity metric to make you feel good about yourself.

Instead, a better goal is to focus on what your audience finds valuable. Why do they follow your LinkedIn page and how do they interact with it? What do they want to learn? What’s something that’s going to stir up their emotions? Is there something begging for their opinions or a discussion? Consider your LinkedIn goals alongside all your overall marketing goals, like increasing qualified leads. What content can you curate that brings targeted leads to your LinkedIn profile?

One thing you can do is search relevant hashtags for your industry on LinkedIn. This platform is great for contributing to and continuing the conversation around important topics related to your business or brand. Through this search, you can also see what most people are talking about, and which conversations continue to grow in popularity as more thought leaders and experts weigh in. Use this information as part of your curation efforts.

2. Identify Topics Your Audience Loves

A key pillar of curation is sharing what you think are the best resources or the most valuable content for your audience. But it’s only effective when your audience finds it valuable too. Think about the platform itself. People come to LinkedIn for professional purposes. They’re hunting for jobs, conversing with like-minded people in their industries, and looking for niche topics and news to expand their knowledge. Just like an in-depth article about content marketing may make people’s eyes glaze over on TikTok, LinkedIn isn’t the place to share dance videos. Your audience may love those in their free time, but that’s not why they’re visiting LinkedIn.

How do you give the people what they want? Do your research. Scour your audience’s profiles. Ask your customer service and sales departments what questions or inquiries they get most often. You can also outright ask your audience what they want to see. LinkedIn has a poll feature that allows you to post a question and get audience results. All this information helps you discover exactly what your audience wants to see online and how they feel about certain topics.

For example, as a content marketing agency that provides content writing services to businesses and agencies, we know that AI writing is a hot topic these days. So, why not create a poll to see what our audience thinks about it? Along with over 550 votes, we had a number of people give their opinions and experiences in the comments. This gave us even more insight and brought our poll post to the top of many news feeds because of its popularity.

Another way to give people what they want is to request your free content marketing analysis report from CopyPress. This document compares your content to that of your top three competitors. It also shares a list of gap keywords for which your audience is searching but you don’t provide yet. Use these keywords to create your own content and browse the internet for helpful resources to share during your LinkedIn curation process.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

3. Review Your Data

You’ve probably heard the phrase “actions speak louder than words.” In marketing, data speaks louder than polls. Your audience may tell you one thing in your LinkedIn polls, but the data shows another. It’s helpful to look at both sides of the equation to determine what the best curation topics are for your niche. LinkedIn has built-in analytics tools and connects with third-party programs to check information like post-performance, interaction, reach, and even how your competitors are doing.

Are you wondering why you should care about data, especially if you plan to share content from other sources? Because data gives insights into what people like and what they want to see. That’s the driving factor behind curation. And you don’t just have to review data from your LinkedIn page to get these results. Look at the same data for your blog, website, email newsletter, or anywhere you share content. What do people click on most? Where do they spend the most time? These are the pieces and topics that get the best reach and most shares.

Data can also tell you if your content curation strategy is working. Are you seeing increased traffic on your page when you share curated pieces? Do your followers make more comments or share your curated pieces? You really can never have too much data. You never know when you might need to reference it to reevaluate your strategy.

4. Develop Your Curation Toolbox

To curate external content, you first have to know what’s out there. You have to put on a lot of hats when curating: detective, appraiser, teacher. The goal is to find the good stuff, decide if it’s right for your audience, then show them how it relates to what they want or need to know about your products or services. It’s easier to do all these things when you have a full toolbox to help. Some tools to explore for curation include:

Google Alerts and Similar Programs

Google Alerts allows you to monitor the internet for information and content on topics of interest. When you know what your audience likes and what they’re looking for, you can set up alerts for those topics. Get posts Google pulls from around the internet sent right to your inbox. Customize the settings by location and frequency to get a list of Google-curated content to browse. Then you can further curate its suggestions for your own LinkedIn feed.

Other news aggregator programs, like Feedly, let you do this same thing on a wider scale. Those results aren’t married to Google’s index or crawler system. Aggregator services may have apps, email communication, and online accounts to help you find, store, and categorize potential curation content. You can review the results to build out your social media strategy.

You can even adjust your LinkedIn notifications to make sure you’re receiving alerts for different news you want to be sure to see.

Newsletters

Subscribing to email newsletters from your competitors and other thought leaders in your field is another way to get curation content and resources sent to your inbox. Marketers curate their newsletters, where copywriters and editors choose the best links and information to share with their audience through that channel. Similar to Google Alerts, the content already went through a phase-one curation, and now it’s up to you to whittle them down further for your audience.

LinkedIn has newsletters you can subscribe to right from your profile. While these newsletters only have one format and come from LinkedIn’s article platform, they still allow you to see what others share on the service. You can also create your own newsletter as another way to curate your own content and send it directly to your audience. This eliminates the chance of it getting lost in their feeds.

Other Social Media Profiles

Follow influential people in your industry, not just on LinkedIn, but on all social media platforms where they have a presence. People who have already established themselves as thought leaders in your niche are the ones talking about upcoming trends. They’re always on the cusp of the next big industry topic. Like the popular kids in high school, they don’t follow trends; they set them.

That’s why it’s good to keep your eyes on their thoughts, content, and resources. It helps you determine what’s popular in your industry and what’s to come. This helps you get ahead of trends and start establishing your company as a thought leader, too. Pay close attention to how their content differs between platforms, and see if their efforts are bringing them more reach and engagement. This can help influence your own curation and publishing.

Follow more than just the heavy hitters in your industry on social media. Tracking members of your target audience, qualified leads, and current customers give you more insights into the questions they ask. This makes it easier to build community by sharing things on your feed and answering their questions with perfectly curated content to meet them.

Hashtags

Hashtags make it easier to find content about trending or grouped topics on social media. LinkedIn, like other social media sites, uses hashtags in posts to organize content. Follow ones that relate to your brand or industry. What content exists on these topics? Are people overlooking excellent resources? Do you have a post in your archive that’s better than what others are sharing on the topic?

Following and using hashtags in your LinkedIn posts helps you join the conversation with your curated content. It also lets you spy on what others are doing and saying to make sure the resources you share are different and better than the majority. When using hashtags with your curated content, include no more than three on LinkedIn. This ensures your posts appear in the most relevant categories where the right audience is most likely to find them. Overusing hashtags makes your posts look cluttered and unfocused in their topics.

Using hashtags in your posts come with the added advantage of notifications from LinkedIn on popular conversations happening around the hashtags you’re using. The platform assumes, probably rightly so, that you want to get involved with or know more about the trending conversations for hashtags you’ve incorporated into your posts. Watch your notifications and click through if LinkedIn tells you about a trending post you may want to see.

Content Calendar

One of the big reasons you’re curating content for LinkedIn is to fill gaps in your social media marketing plan and making sure you hit that daily post threshold. Using a content calendar helps you see where those holes are and gives you a way to schedule the content to fill them. It also helps you keep track of what’s going live and when it happens. A content calendar provides a visual for your entire LinkedIn posting plan and lets you see the balance of created vs. curated content you present to your audience.

Although LinkedIn doesn’t have a schedule feature, you can still create a spreadsheet and set your own reminder alarms when it’s time to post something new to your company page. Alternatively, there are a number of scheduling tools to make this process more streamlined so you can plan ahead.

5. Provide Commentary on Other Content

When curating content for LinkedIn, don’t just share a link and call it a day. Yes, you’re providing resources and content from outside sources to supplement your new content. But it’s all for your own marketing benefit. In each post, share why you think each resource is worth providing. Pull a quote, make a claim, or even tag the original brand or writer’s account to start a conversation. Link the resource back to a poll you made or something else you shared recently.

Despite what it may look like from the outside, content curation, especially on LinkedIn, isn’t promoting other people’s content. It’s about showing how your company or brand knows what it’s talking about, with proof from around the industry to back up your claims. Providing commentary on your curated content also opens up room for discussion in your comments section. This is an opportunity to build community, share more resources, and learn more about what your audience wants and needs. And, as we mentioned, the more this happens, the better chance you have to show up in the notifications of others because your post is trending.

6. Curate Your Own Content

We’ve talked a lot about curating content for LinkedIn from sources that aren’t your own blog or website. That is one way to do curation, and it’s a helpful way to find more content for your stack. But it’s not the only way to do curation. You can pull your own archived content for LinkedIn, too.

Look through your previously published content from your website. Does anything stand out as being timely and valuable to your audience? Check out your LinkedIn data. Is there a popular post from last year that’s still very timely and relevant to trending news in your industry? Don’t be hesitant to share it again. These are all pieces prime for content curation for your LinkedIn feed. They might not be perfect when you find them during your search. The content may need updates to remove outdated links or include new talking points and findings. But fixing up these pieces to make them the best they can be is actually part of the curation process.

When you’ve polished, updated, and are ready to share your pieces, you can then link to them or post full articles on LinkedIn to show off what you think is your brand’s best content work.

Related: Curating Content: What Other Articles Don’t Tell You

CopyPress helps you create your own content that’s prime for self-curation. Blog posts, articles, eBooks, white papers, no matter what you pick, all of it has the potential to be curated content. And all of it you can share on your LinkedIn feed. With an arsenal of pieces, your content marketing and curation possibilities are endless. Schedule your free introduction call to get started.

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer