If you’re looking to create an exceptional user experience for your community, then it’s important to start by defining your content curation strategy. A content curation strategy will help you determine the right kinds of content to highlight and provide a model for your users to follow. Over time, your approach to content curation will change through ebbs and flows based on how your community engages with your content.

Why is a content curation strategy important?

Honeycommb gives you a complete social network solution where you are the owner of your platform, content, and data. Now, since you’re in charge, there are a lot of other ways you can customize and use features to make your app feel even more like home for your audience.

The home feed of a user makes or breaks their experience. If they enter a social network where no one is being social, they’ll leave immediately and won’t think twice about coming back. Curating their feed, highlighting active members, and directing to top performing content will keep you members coming back daily.

What’s the difference between a content curation strategy and a content strategy?

The biggest difference between the two pillars within your marketing program or activation will dictate how you create, share and connect on a meaningful level with your community.

Your Content Strategy Should…

• Be based on the pillars that closely associate quality content with your brand
• Reflect the value proposition and messaging schemes that drive further brand loyalty and engagement
• Be tied to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are related to engagement and
• Align with the way you talk about your brand across every single channel where your audience exists

Your Content Curation Strategy Should…

• Provide a framework for what you want your users to share in the community
• Highlight users that perform the right behaviors you want others in the community to replicate
• Promote User Generated Content to drive a snowball effect
• Be a measurable, tangible KPIs that relate to spin-off or similar content types

What tools help curate content?

Curating content is a process of categorizing, organizing, and exposing the most relevant content to your members. Honeycommb has quite a few tools on the platform to help you find, share and highlight the best content in your community easily.

1. Featured Posts

A key component in your curation strategy is to highlight user content that you want to replicate and reinforce. Featuring content is a great tactic to highlight members who contribute to the community. Ultimately the goal here is to inspire others who want to receive the same recognition.

When a user enters your app they’ll see featured posts pinned right at the top. Choosing fresh and interesting posts to features drives engagement and retention. Use featured posts just like dangling a carrot; promote the users who are behaving and sharing in the right way and expose their content to your entire network.

2. Verified Users

You identify important members of your community by marking them as verified and using your own network’s verbiage. You can use verified to identify valuable, trusted members within the community, so this is a tactic to reward exceptional behavior. Other members seeing their counterparts verified encourages regular members to be more involved so they, too, can become verified with a star next to their name one day.

Any content posted by Verified Users are highlighted in their own feed when searching through the platform. And what they post is scored higher by Honeycommb’s algorithm so it’s more likely to be seen in the home feed. As a result, you save time combing through content on your own because a verified user’s content is prominently displayed.

3. Auto Follows

Setting up Auto Follow accounts ensure that when a user first registers and joins the community, their home feed will be filled with active members and high-quality content.

Auto follows are an ideal way to introduce new users and provide a great example of how they should also contribute to the community. You can choose up to 15 users who are automatically followed by all within the network. It’s important to choose the right accounts to be auto-followed: members of your network (Verified Users, ambassadors, etc.) or your own accounts created by your organization to produce dedicated content relevant to your community i.e. News, Events, HR Updates, etc..

4. Feed Banner

Whether you’d like to promote an external URL or point to a user profile and/or piece of content within the application, this is a great way for you to promote something that’s highly visible to each and every user in the community. 

Ultimately, the feed banner is an extremely dynamic asset because it can be linked to a variety of places in the app or outside.

5. Custom Notifications

Save the best for last, right? Using custom notifications, you can promote specific pieces of content directly to segments or your entire audience. Leveraging notifications is an exceptional way to reach your entire audience immediately with just a click. You must be weary however that these are notifications curated by admin’s and not notifications that they’ve opted into as members of the community.

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Reach out to Honeycommb today to get started or Book a Demo to see what we can build together for your audience.