Having a social media presence is kind of like having a kid…there’s a birth, followed by the not-so-glamorous years of daily care, attention and feeding.

In social media, those daily parenting tasks usually revolve around feeding your social channels a balanced diet of content that’s…

• Relevant to your audience
• Relevant for the channel
• Brand-appropriate
• Vetted from a reliable source or generated by yourself
• Timely
• Share-worthy
• Interesting

And that’s a process that can be time-consuming and challenging.

Of course, there’s a shortcut you can take…syndication. With the click of a button, you can auto post one tasty piece of content to all of your social channels and be done with it.

But that’s kind of like throwing all of your social offspring a big bag of chips as you head out the door for the night. It’s not very healthy and it sends them a message that they’re really not worth the effort.

Instead, why not try some of these tips to keep your content fresh and your workload manageable?

Increase your content curation.

Not everything you post in social media has to be about you (in fact, it SHOULDN’T be all about you). Instead, start using curation tools or feed readers to help you sift through the gobs of content on the interwebs written by others that may be a good fit for your industry and audience, and augment that with content you’ve generated yourself.

Don’t forget to read the stuff you’re curating. You are, in effect, endorsing this content and its source. Make sure it lives up to your standards and is a good match for your brand.

Look to print for a helping hand.

Sad as it is to say, people are kinda lazy and tend to swim around in the same pool of industry content on a day-to-day basis. If you want to stand out from the pack, go old school and get some support from print publications.

Read and share information you find in your industry’s pubs in your social channels, especially content or quotes from articles the publication did not put online. If it’s not online (or online in an easy-to-share form) chances are no one else has noticed it, so you’ll look like the big news-breaker when you pull that nugget out of your back pocket.

Share different content in your various social channels.

Different social spaces have different audiences who engage in different communication behaviors. So why not serve them up different dishes? For example, a more visually interesting piece of content may play better on Facebook or Pinterest where an image is often the first thing that captures the eye, whereas content that’s more time sensitive may break faster on Twitter.

Share the same piece of content differently from channel to channel.

If you are going to share the same piece of content in many channels, do it with some grace. Change up the wording you use to describe content, and stagger your posts throughout the day so you don’t annoy your audience. For example…

• Tweet in the a.m.: “How meditation can help you heal your brain [link] #Infographic.”
• Facebook later in the day: “Interesting meditation infographic [link] Do you meditate? Please let us know why and how it works for you in the comments.”
• G+ in the late afternoon: “Meditation and brain health: an interesting study and infographic from +COMPANY [paste in short excerpt].”

Don’t neglect the power of conversation.

Oftentimes, companies get stuck on this notion of “putting out the content” and forget that a good portion of your time on social media should be about simply engaging with others in conversation.

Back and forth banter is technically “content” too, and important content at that. Make sure those conversations include keywords and have a consistent brand voice and they can become an very natural extension of your marketing efforts.

Like kids, your social audience will probably rarely thank you for serving them a consistent diet of original and intriguing content each day. And that’s okay. The end goal isn’t to satiate their hunger for information completely. It’s simply to give them enough treats today to keep them coming back tomorrow for the next serving.