If you had asked me a couple years ago which social media dashboard I used, I would have always gone with Hootsuite. 

You see, they’re a local Vancouver startup, and I like supporting local biz. They have been very generous to my students, and I liked the platform. 

But over the past couple of years, my loyalties have shifted. 

A couple years ago, I started playing with Agorapulse, a new social media dashboard, created by Emeric Ernoult out of Paris. At the same time, Hootsuite started to remove some of my favourite features of the platform, so these days, I’m pretty much all in in on Agorapulse. 

I use it for a variety of different things, but primarily for creating and scheduling content for my own feeds and for my clients. 

When you’re creating content for a social feed, there are, essentially, three kinds of content you want to use: 

• Original, or created content
• Curated content that comes from other sources but is related to your brand, and
• Influencer content

Now, the challenge with influencer content is that it can be sparse, unless you’re a huge brand like Hershel or Nike or Target. So that kind of content will likely not come up often. 

And created content? It’s great–but it’s also an immense amount of work to bang out original blog posts/podcasts/YouTubes/Instagram photos every single day. 

So for most of us doing this work, probably about 10-20% of our content is created, about 10% or so is influencer or what’s called UGC (User Generated Content), and then that leaves 70% that we have to fill. 

Curation is the key. You subscribe to great feeds that are related to your brand, and then share their content. So, for example, for this blog, I often read The Social Media Examiner. I keep an eye on everything Mari Smith does. I subscribe to the Later blog to keep up to date on the latest with Instagram. And that’s the kind of content that I sort through and then cherry-pick the best content to share with you on my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. 

Agorapulse helps me do this in just a few minutes a day. I basically spend an hour or two once a week creating content for all my feeds. A few minutes, once a week, is all you need to have a lively Twitter feed. 

Here’s how to create and schedule a week’s worth of tweets in just a few minutes: 

By the way, I also create spreadsheets of tweets that are my created content (ie my own blog posts and youtube videos) and bulk upload that to Agorapulse once a month or so. Here’s how to do that. 

So by doing these two simple methods, the bulk tweet upload and curating tweets, you can ensure you always have content on your feed, and you are serving both your audience and yourself.