How to discover and share topical news easily

What’s your organisation’s particular area of expertise? Demonstrating your knowledge and insight – what’s often referred to as thought leadership – is an excellent way of building reputation and trust, and if done in the right way can also build a digital audience you can communicate to and with.

It’s the essence of content marketing, and you can start the journey quickly and easily by regularly sharing topical news from your key insight area across social channels. To begin with, aim for four posts per day on Twitter and two on LinkedIn and/or Facebook.

That might seem like a lot of news to unearth each day, but with the right tools it won’t take long.

Finding content to share

You probably already have a few websites or Twitter accounts you visit to stay up-to-date on news about your industry or sector. The next step is to expand your list of sources and organise them.

Here are a few of the ways to make finding the new content a quick and easy task each day:

Google

You may use it all the time already, but it’s still the best place to start building your sources. Try searching for different combinations of keywords related to your industry and see what comes up – for example, if you’re a private equity company you could search for “private capital”, “leveraged buyouts”, “venture capital” etc, as well “private equity”. Check through several pages of results, not just the first one. Now do the same on Google News – click on “News” at the top of any results page. Make a list of the sites providing the kind of stories you want to share.

Google Alerts

Now get Google to send you an email every time a relevant piece of news is published. Go to www.google.com/alerts and type the search phrase into the box at the top, then click “Create Alert”. The default option is for a daily email, but this can be changed under “Show options”. You might create several alerts for different search terms, depending on what you found in the previous step.

Feedly

This is a great way of keeping track of all stories published by the sources you found on Google. Just go to feedly.com and “get started” (choose the Feedly option to sign in using an email address and password). Search for your sources in the box top-right and choose “+feedly” to add them to your account. Once you’ve set this up you can click through your feeds using the menu on the left-hand side of the page, or click “All” for a combined list. Clicking on the tick at the top of the page will mark all stories as read so you know what’s new each time you visit.

Nuzzel

You can find out what’s being shared by your social media contacts with this tool. Go to nuzzel.com and sign in with your Twitter account and you’ll be presented with a list of the most-shared stories. The real benefits only emerge once you’re following the right people and organisations, so head to your Twitter account and make any required changes – unfollowing accounts that are no longer relevant as well as following new ones.

BuzzSumo

Even the free version of BuzzSumo is powerful, revealing the content that’s performing well on social networks. Go to buzzsumo.com and enter some search words or a website address. You can then narrow the search down to the last day or week using the left-hand menu.

Sharing your content

Now that you know how to tap a steady stream of content that will be relevant and engaging for your audience, you need to start sharing it. There are dozens of ways of doing this, but one of the easiest is with a scheduling tool, such as Hootsuite or Buffer.

The big benefit of one of these tools is that they allow you to program social posts in advance – so in theory you can set up your whole week’s output in one sitting. Buffer in particular makes this very simple using a schedule of timed slots. All you need to do is paste your story URL, type your social post, choose one of the page’s images from the carousel and then click “Add to Queue”.

Next steps

So your journey as a thought leader has begun. Where to next? How about creating your own thought leadership material to share with your newly-engaged audience? Nothing builds your reputation like original, intelligent content. And after that? If you can create enough fresh content from the expertise contained within your organisation and then combine it with the best from elsewhere you can develop your brand’s online presence into a specialist knowledge hub. That’s real thought leadership.

As brand consultants, we will work with you to shape your strategy, boost your brand’s influence and meet your business objectives. Call us today on 01494 672122

Paul Muggeridge is Head of Content at Formative Content. Paul is a highly experienced, multi-skilled journalist who drives day to day content production in Formative‘s busy client newsroom.

Formative Content is a UK based content marketing agency producing high quality content, live event coverage and strategic communications support for clients around the world.