Content curation is a great way to expand your offering and provide information that may not be your area of expertise–but is certainly relevant—to your customers. It may even provide that extra layer of credibility for a service you are providing!

Think about it this way: Suppose you follow a bank on social media. They create lots of great custom content, which is fantastic. Creative (and way cute) checklists, detailed service overviews, and snazzy mortgage calculators. But at the end of the day, it is all from that bank. Created, developed, and paid for by that bank. If mixed into that custom content flow were also third-party articles that were helpful to you, as a bank customer, but not promotional or biased, perhaps even offering ideas/services outside of what the bank offers, wouldn’t that establish some serious street cred for that bank?

I am always impressed when I walk into a store, and the manager tells me that they can’t help me with exactly what I need, but they know the store on the other side of town that can! What!? They are seriously more interested in my benefit then theirs as a store!? They may lose the sale today, but I am definitely going to remember that and 1) come back and 2) tell that story to my friends and get them to that store! Same thing is true for your patients. I am not saying send them to other dental practices. I am simply suggesting that giving them the resources necessary to make the right decision for themselves can work wonders! It proves you truly care about them and are out for their best interest. Often curated content can help you show that.

The bad thing about content curation? It’s quite time consuming. Although it is super interesting—because trust me, you can learn a lot—it also means you gotta read it all and ensure what you are posting is something that 1) resonates with your patients and 2) you are alright with reflecting as your opinion. So, as easy as that sounds, it does take some serious time on your part. But….

 

BACK TO GOOD NEWS! There are tools to help!

Here are a few tools to help you find exactly the content you need, and quickly. Plus a bonus tip…

POCKET: This is somewhat like a nifty bookmarking tool. You like? It is fantastic for content curation. When you find something you like, simply put it in your pocket. Then when you are ready to load up some curated stuff into your social media stream, just go to your ongoing list and, VOILA! Posts galore!

FEEDLY: Basically a fancy RSS feed, Feedly allows you to narrow down subject and source lists to pull together all relevant content for you in one nice spot. You can also SAVE FOR LATER, which is a great thing when you find stuff you like on the fly but aren’t wearing your content-loading hat at the moment.

BONUS SNIPLY: 

Now, here is your bonus tip, for those still with me. Sniply! Sniply allows you to create a small banner ad that will layover any third-party site you send folks too. This is A-MAZ-ING! It is like free advertising. Sending your patients to the ADA’s website to learn about a root canal? At the bottom of that page, you can have a call-to-action with your logo that says “SCHEDULE YOUR APPOINTMENT NOW!”, and it links right back to your page. BOOM! No more lost patients.

You’ve got this!

So, content curation. Beneficial–yes. A little time consuming–yes. But with the right tools, you can maximize your time and reap the benefits! It is important to remember that content curation does not work on its own. It is a value-add to establish credibility and resourcefulness to your own content and service offering. You don’t want to only push out other people’s stuff all day long; then you lose your street cred since you aren’t offering an opinion or value of your own. Creation and curation. Milk and cookies. Peanut butter and jelly…ok, you get it.