The 4 Don’ts of Sharing Curated Content on Social Media for B2B Marketers

For B2B marketers, sharing curated content is a great way to provide value to your audience in addition to your organization’s own social media content. Consider it an opportunity to diversify your content or perhaps to act as a filler when you are too busy to create your own. Remember, content is king, but you will still want to be sure anything curated makes sense for your brand and marketing strategy.

So, what is curated content? It is content created by another source that you then share on your social platforms as valuable information to your audience as part of your B2B marketing strategy. This can be an interesting article from an industry publication, a study from a research firm or a blog post with third-party statistics to name a few examples. While it’s convenient to take advantage of the legwork others have done to provide useful information and can help diversify the content you provide on your social media accounts, you can easily get sidetracked with sharing information for the sake of having more content. However, it’s important to be thoughtful in what you choose to curate in order avoid social media marketing gaffes or mistakes.

The 4 Dont’s of Sharing Curated Content on Social Media for B2B Marketers

1. Don’t go in without a strategy

Prior to posting any curated content, be sure you have a strategy. Consider your current posting schedule and the cadence for curation where it allows. If the frequency you have created for your accounts is to share content four times a week, define where curation makes sense on a weekly or monthly basis. In this case, you could share a curated piece once a week or every other week and proceed with the content you create on the other days. Another thing to keep in mind is the kind of information that will be valuable to your audience when curating; it should still align with your B2B marketing strategy and be information that your audience will gain value or insight from. This is also a good chance to share types of content that your organization normally doesn’t produce or topics you don’t normally cover in order to add more variety to your social posting.

2. Don’t share content without thoroughly reading

This may seem like a no-brainer, however it is imperative to thoroughly read through the information prior to sharing. The source of the information doesn’t exactly have your company’s best interests in mind, so you will want to do your due diligence to catch any information that could go against or doesn’t align well with your brand or strategy. Check to make sure the content doesn’t have more pages than what you have read through and that you haven’t skipped over any information caused by distracting advertisements that often show in between paragraphs. Slow down your reading to take in every detail and consider whether it could cast a negative light on your company.

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3. Don’t share content that is affiliated with your competitors

Pay close attention to this point. The last thing you want is to share information that is written by a competitor or contains any content that endorses a competitor. Your organization wouldn’t create social media content that supports your competitors, so be sure to follow this when curating as well. For example, let’s say you find an article that discusses how your industry is projected to grow at an impressive rate. This could certainly be interesting news for your followers, right? However, you then stumble on a sentence that mentions the leading companies in your industry (also known as your competitors) and your company isn’t mentioned. While 95 percent of the article could have no mention of your competitors, even one mention should disqualify it from curation consideration, particularly if your company isn’t also mentioned.

4. Don’t forget to give credit where credit is due

Everyone likes recognition for a job well done, right? By sharing content on your organization’s channels, you are essentially saying “Well done!” to the content creator. But be sure to give a little extra recognition and avoid the appearance that you are framing content as your own by going the extra mile to tag sources in your curated posts, where possible. Simply tag it by typing the “@” sign following the name and selecting the correct source. If the source isn’t on the social channel that you are posting to, simply mention their name in the post copy.

Happy Marketing!