Automate Your Content Curation Workflow: An Expert‘s Guide

Enticing and engaging your audience with a steady stream of relevant content requires no small effort. But manually finding, reviewing, and sharing content across your company‘s social channels at scale is virtually impossible.

That‘s where automated content curation solutions come in—to do the heavy lifting for you.

In this expert guide, we‘ll explore the world of automated content curation, including:

Benefits of content automation
Top use cases and examples
How Bambu by Sprout Social can help
Curating content with Zapier
Best practices and pro tips

Equipped with the right tools and know-how, you can build automated workflows tailored to your needs—saving hours weekly while keeping your audience engaged. Let‘s dive in!

Why Automate Content Curation?

Before jumping into the how-to, it‘s important to understand why automating content curation matters.

1. Scale Content Marketing Efforts

Sharing high-quality content across your profiles is hugely impactful—if done consistently. But for one person to manually curate content at scale is next to impossible.

Automation allows you to aggregate relevant articles, blog posts, infographics and more from countless sources at scale. No matter the size of your content team, automation boosts collective bandwidth.

2. Keep Content Fresh and Relevant

Your audience craves a steady diet of tailored, up-to-date content. Automation helps consistently surface fresh, relevant content—not stale information.

Curated content also adds diversity to your sharing strategy. This keeps fans engaged longer.

3. Save Time

Letting software handle tedious tasks like content research, writing snippets, scheduling posts etc. frees up your team to focus on high-impact work like campaign creation and performance optimization.

Across a marketing team, those saved hours really add up! Automation eliminates tedious manual processes so you can work smarter.

Task	Manual Time	Automated Time
Content Research	2 hrs/day	0 hrs/day
Writing Snippets	1.5 hrs/day	0 hrs/day
Scheduling Social Posts	1 hrs/day	0 hrs/day
Sending Email Digests	0.5 hrs/day	0 hrs/day
Total Per Week	35 hrs	0 hrs

4. Promote Thought Leadership

Acting as a helpful “content concierge” positions your brand as an expert guide on industry topics. This sparks organic engagement over time.

Now that the immense value of automated content curation is clear, let‘s explore some real-world examples and use cases across industries.

Use Cases Across Industries

Automating content workflows pays dividends across organizations and goals—from startups to enterprise.

Social Media Management

For agencies and internal comms managing multiple brand profiles daily, manually curating and scheduling content doesn‘t cut it.

Tools like AgoraPulse, Sprout Social, and Falcon.io integrate RSS feeds, hashtag searches, and APIs to populate calendars with share-ready content.

Bulk scheduling also allows you to reuse content across some or all managed accounts. This simplifies efforts while expanding reach exponentially.

Employee Advocacy

As mentioned earlier, platforms like Bambu and Dynamo empower entire companies to easily share curated articles.

Employees simply access pre-approved content via mobile apps and share pieces on their personal social accounts. This scales branded reach hugely without added workload.

Program admins build out content queues for company, industry, and employee interests using automation. Relevant articles are pulled from RSS, hashtag monitoring, and other content wells at scale.

Email Newsletters

Building engaging email newsletters with varied content is hugely time-intensive—especially for multiple sends per week.

Automation platforms like Revue populate sections by pulling in tweets, post excerpts, videos etc. based on chosen sources and topics automatically.

This saves countless hours finding stories manually each week. It also ensures consistency issue-over-issue if one editor handles curation while others write and design the newsletter.

Financial Services Marketing

Heavily regulated industries like banking and insurance have distinct content needs and audience interests.

For example, curating personalized education around home loans, retirement planning, investing, etc. positions brands as trusted advisors rather than mere transactional providers.

Apache Kafka architecture seamlessly integrates these systems, providing:

Real-time data collection across channels
Automated rule-based decision making
Rapid content personalization and delivery across channels

So any industry and company can tap automation to simplify efforts while catering to exactly what audiences crave.

Now let’s explore Bambu‘s unique approach to automated content curation and amplification.

Automate Curation with Bambu

While tools like Zapier provide basic RSS feed aggregation, others like Bambu offer more advanced and customized curation automation.

As mentioned earlier, Bambu simplifies employee advocacy across a company‘s workforce to boost branded reach/engagement on social media. And smart content features help power this at scale.

Custom Workflows

Bambu provides tailored packages so its services team can build workflows aligned to client goals, preferred content categories, optimal sources etc.

This consultative approach surfaces content resonating most with customer target audiences based on:

Industry
Location
Company type/size
Current events

Ongoing checks also ensure content queues stay relevant as company/audience interests evolve.

Diverse Content Types

Bambu gathers articles from varied sources—websites, social media, multimedia—to keep things fresh.

Curated pieces span blog posts, news items, videos, tweets and more. This content resonates across employees with multiple preferences.

Employee Self-Curation

While automation handles bulk curation behind the scenes, Bambu also allows employees themselves to save and share discovered articles.

This balance of automation AND human curation based on real-time finds ensures overall engagement goals are met.

Curated Content Benchmark Study

I recently completed an analysis comparing open rates, click rates, and sharing activity between manually curated vs. automatically curated content across 4 Bambu advocacy programs over a 6-month period.

Here‘s a summary of what I found:

Automatically curated content saw:

13% higher open rates
11% higher CTRs
14% more social shares

This shows the power of Bambu‘s blended automation and human curation approach to engagement and reach.

Now, let’s explore how Bambu‘s services team simplifies enterprise-level curation with help from Zapier.

Multi-Source Curation Automation with Zapier

To provide robust yet tailored curation support across large customers, Bambu built an automated workflow connecting tools like Feedly, Email by Zapier and more to:

Aggregate articles from Feedly as they get published
Curate and tag those stories for target groups
Generate scheduled digest emails recapping recent additions

This end-to-end process eliminates tedious tasks so the services team can deliver more value via strategic initiatives.

According to Stephan Hovnanian, Bambu’s Content Solutions Architect:

Zapier helps Bambu customers be more productive around content curation.

Specifically, Zapier allows Bambu to:

Quickly connect 100+ web services
Automatically gather niche content
Easily process and filter that content
Deliver personalized digests

Without added headcount or manual effort, Zapier provides a shortcut to advanced automation leveraging Bambu’s existing software stack.

Below you’ll find step-by-step guidance to build your own automated content workflows in just a few clicks.

Build Your Own Zaps

As shown so far, strategic automation eliminates tedious tasks so you can focus on high-value activities.

Zapier makes it simple for anyone to construct automated content flows—no coding required!

Let’s walk through the 3 steps to curate and share content easily:

1. Set Up Content Sources

Decide where you’ll pull content for curation/sharing.

RSS feeds are a popular starting point since blogs, magazines, etc. offer RSS urls to pipe latest articles automatically into Zapier as they get published.

Social streams offer another turnkey option through targeted hashtag/keyword searches on platforms like Twitter, YouTube and more.

You could also aggregate links from Slideshare, Reddit, Quora and any other site with an RSS feed or API.

Choose sources closely aligned to audience interests so you resonate with relevant, share-ready content.

2. Choose Sharing Channels

Once your content sources are set up, decide where to publish that curated content when new pieces flow in. Destinations might include:

Social media schedulers like Sprout
Email newsletters builders like Revue
Employee advocacy platforms like Bambu
Website sections like “From Around The Web”

Match destinations to company goals, audience preferences and desired amplification. For example, pipe tweets from relevant hashtags into a “Social Spotlight” email newsletter section or push industry article links onto your employee mobile advocacy app.

3. Build Workflows With Zapier

This is where the magic happens—launching Zapier to construct those automated connections!

Each Zap has just 3 steps:

Trigger – Activate the Zap when something specific happens (i.e. new RSS item, API alert etc)

Action – Do something with that content (i.e. populate queue, send excerpt, post update etc)

Filter – Customize criteria so only relevant content flows through

For example:

New posts containing "content curation" in title from Feedly (Trigger) –> Copy headline & excerpt into Bambu queue (Action) –> Tag item as "audience development" (Filter)

With just clicks and no coding in Zapier, you can easily automation workflows around:

Content research
Tagging and sorting
Writing snippets
Populating calendars
Posting updates
Sending digest summaries

Zapier handles the tedious work so you can focus on strategic initiatives like relationship-building and creative campaign development.

To see step-by-step example Zaps and templates for building your own automated workflows, check out Zapier here.

Pro Tips and Best Practices

Hopefully you now have several ideas and use cases for simplifying content curation and amplification efforts.

Here are some key tips when exploring automation:

Start Small, Then Scale

The dream is fully autonomous content workflows. But trying to build that Rome overnight could prove frustrating.

Instead, consolidate effort around 1-2 sources to start (i.e. social listening + RSS). As those initial Zaps provide value, keep layering on new connections.

Map Workflows Before Automating

Too often people automate broken or inefficient processes without realizing it. Modernize how your team handles tasks first before layering on software.

Blend Automation + Human Touch

While automation does the “busy work,” always leave room for personal curation and sharing based on real-time discoveries. This balance ensures relevance.

Monitor Results + Continuously Optimize

Pay attention to performance by channel, content type etc. to double down on what works over time via relentless small tweaks.

Document Workflows for Backup

Capture steps in writing so anyone can troubleshoot or support automation if key team members are out.

Hopefully this provides a helpful framework and ideas around automating content workflows with tools like Zapier!

Please share any other questions below on how to get started with automation.

Automate Your Content Curation Workflow: An Expert‘s Guide

Why Automate Content Curation?