Why Feedly Can Cut An Hour A Day From Your Social Media

If you’re like a lot of business owners, keeping your social media active and fresh is one of your most dreaded tasks. It’s time consuming — and if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, it’s expensive. Not only that, you’ll inevitably start feeling like there is nothing left for you to say or share in the entire vast internet.
This is where Feedly can be a big help.

What Is Feedly?

Feedly is the most popular RSS reader out these. What’s RSS? An acronym for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication (nobody is quite sure), RSS is a tech format that allows frequently-updated websites, such as blogs and news sites, to provide a stream of up-to-the-minute posts that may be read in a customized reader rather than on the website directly.
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Why would you want to read updates in a reader instead of a website? Well, if you read one, and only one, website every day, there would be no need for it. If you check five, or 10, or 20, an RSS reader is the difference between visiting each site individually to manually check for updates and having all of the updates sent to you in one place.
For about 15 million users, Feedly is that place. It’s free, easy to use, and available on desktop and mobile.

How Feedly Works For Social Media

An RSS reader is designed as a tool for consuming content, so you might not immediately see it as a social media tool. In reality, it is one of the best social media tools out there.
What aspect of social media consumes the most time? It’s not the actual posting. Responses (if you’re lucky enough to get interaction) take just a few seconds each. Creating your own original, high-quality content to post to social media to inform your followers and enable them to share your advice takes time.

But these are only a percentage of the posts you’ll make if you’re a small business using social media effectively. Many of your other shares will be relevant information and links from around the Interwebs.
Finding dynamic content that will engage your followers is the most time-consuming aspect of social media. A good RSS reader like Feedly cuts down that time dramatically by putting the newest, most relevant content right in front of you, ready to share, without you having to go look for it.

Effective Content Curation

Content curation is gathering the best, most relevant content on the Internet covering a specific theme and presenting it to an audience. Since there is an overwhelming number of articles, posts, pictures and videos out there, selecting the best involves trawling through acres of content to find these gems — content that will appeal to your followers and generate interaction, more followers, and, ultimately, increased business.
Feedly does most of the heavy lifting for you. While you can add your favorite websites to check for updates at a glance, you can also search certain hashtags.
For example, say you sell custom furniture. You can add topics like #interior design, #home, #lifestyle, and #furniture trends to help find content to keep your social media followers engaged when you’re not posting about your business directly.
This adds value to your social media sites, and will make your followers feel as if they’re getting something more than advertising and self-promotion — a big turn-off for many.

How To Get Started With Feedly

It’s easier than you think. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Feedly.com and create an account. You can create an account in a couple of clicks by signing up with your Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, or Evernote logins. You’ll be able to use Feedly with any of those platforms once your account is created.

2. Start adding content. On the left sidebar, you’ll see a link that says “Add Content.” When you click, it will display a search engine to find blogs. You either type in the name of the blog or website, or type in a keyword. A dropdown will show you the top sites related to that keyword. Or click “enter” to display a listing of the sites in more detail. To save a feed that interests you, click on the green “+feedly” button.

3. Organize your feeds. When you add a site, you will be prompted to add it to a Category. You can make multiple categories to keep the feeds organized.

4. Find content. To see all of the newest content, click on Home. All of your feeds will be combined, with content listed with the most recent on top. You can determine how many articles fit on your screen by clicking the settings gear on the top right. Choices include:

1. Title Only — Good if you want to see lots of article titles in list format.

2. Magazine — Shows a thumbnail image and a short description of the story.

3. Cards — Larger, “Pinterest” style listing.

4. Full Articles — Shows each article full-size, in a blog format (you will usually have to click a link to read the whole thing).

5. Grouped by Feeds — Sorts articles by website, in alphabetical order.

5. Share content. Sharing is simple — just open the article by clicking on the headline and click on an icon at the top to share on Facebook, Twitter, or add to Evernote. A dropdown to the right offers additional options, such as Google+. To integrate with Hootsuite or Buffer (and save even more time by scheduling posts ahead), you’ll need to upgrade for a nominal fee.

6. Save content. It’s best to spread social media posts out. If you find several good articles at once, save a couple by clicking on “save” (when you hover over a preview, both “hide” and “save” will appear.

Getting the most out of Feedly

If you give yourself 5-10 minutes to check Feedly on your laptop or mobile, you’ll find content you want to share very quickly.
The premium (paid) option offers integrating and scheduling with a Social Media Management System (SMMS) like Hootsuite or Buffer (our preferred scheduling tool for social media).
While scheduling for later is a great bonus, one thing that can make your social media dynamic is to share when content is brand new. That amazing video or informative article might be stale by the time it posts if you put it in a queue, especially if it goes viral while you were sitting on it. Queue your original content if it isn’t time sensitive, but try and share good content quickly.
Ideally, you’ll check Feedly very quickly a couple of times a day, and share something via social media each time. The easiest way to do this is with the Feedly mobile app. The best thing about using Feedly on mobile is that you can turn otherwise wasted time into productive time.

Use it while waiting at the bank, on the bus or train, or while waiting for a meeting to start. Using times like these to do some quick social networking equals an even bigger savings of time.
Note – we use the paid version combined with Buffer and it saves even more time, as we don’t have to use it every day.

Reclaiming that hour

Once you have your Feedly account set up, you’ll start saving time immediately. The more you put into the set up, the more time it will ultimately save you. If you currently spend over an hour a day (the includes the various time added up) curating content for social media, you can save an hour — especially if you normally spend that time hunched over your computer. Here’s how you can add 3-5 fresh, high quality, curated posts throughout a day in 20 minutes or less:

• Spend 10 minutes in the morning checking Feedly. Post the best thing you find immediately. Save the next best posts for later.

• Midmorning, spend a couple of minutes looking for new content. If nothing is found, share from your saved articles.

• Early afternoon, spend another two minutes.

• Late afternoon, spend another two minutes.

If you’re not finding at least 3 fresh, hot items to share, it’s time to add more content to your Collections. Allow yourself some time every now and again to update your feeds. That means getting rid of feeds that you don’t pull from and adding new feeds.

Make a habit of checking Feedly more than once day, and you might even stop seeing social media updating as such a chore.
Do you use Feedly? Have any good content curation tips? Share them in the comments.
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