The Curated Community: Meet Gianfranco Capozzi
User Stories
Marissa Burdett
For Gianfranco Capozzi, Head of Esports, curating content is not just a “nice-to-have” tactic for his marketing strategy, it’s a critical component. In order to promote his online community and raise awareness around the ever-growing arena of esports, social media and content marketing have become necessary in helping his brand stand out in a competitive industry.
Whether someone is an esports enthusiast or an occasional viewer or gamer, the Esports community aims to connect people to important information and resources on how to get involved. With a primary focus on millennial gamers who grew up in the “golden age” of old-school video games, it was critical that Esports fuel the channels these individuals were already using with content they would actually care about in order to garner interest and facilitate discussion.
Over two years ago, while Gianfranco explored and built new strategies around his social media presence, he started recognizing the need to adopt content curation to support these efforts. He explained, “With a plethora of social media platforms around, and so many different activities that can be implemented through digital marketing campaigns, the risk of getting lost–or wasting time–was a rising concern.”
Specifically, he was coming up short in his initial curation efforts. A standard Google search was not enough to find the highest quality news around his niche topic, since it just resulted in pages with the best SEO practices or greatest macro traffic. To him, these weren’t necessarily indicators of top quality content, at least not enough to attract interest and boost engagement in his vivid social media communities. Because the esports industry is still quite young and growing considerably, not all popular news websites have picked up on the industry’s full potential, making it challenging to discover content that meets the standard Gianfranco and his team were looking for.
He began following various entrepreneurs and influencers, mostly through LinkedIn and Twitter, and he had some luck there. As a result, he began to subscribe to the RSS feeds of “authoritative” websites from the industry. However, he began wondering what he might be missing by only keeping tabs on his favorite websites. He asked himself, “What if something compelling had been published on a new website outside of my radar?”(Click to Tweet)
On the quest to find a solution that would be compatible with his preferred social media management platform, Hootsuite, Gianfranco came across UpContent. Thanks to his free trial, he realized that he no longer had to utilize a manual curation process. UpContent saved him time and brought him better content than ever. Being able to consolidate his marketing technology stack is a huge win, and this deep integration with Hootsuite is one of his favorite UpContent features.
Gianfranco often turns to UpContent’s shareability sort to determine which articles or blog posts will likely produce high levels of engagement, an element that is “of the utmost importance, as we can determine what’s already trending in any determined time frame, and use the results to brief our Esports journalists and authors to add value to their articles.” Through analytics tools, he is able to monitor the engagement around the pieces he has curated and tweak his strategy quickly and efficiently. Thanks to Gianfranco’s curation efforts on social media, Esports has seen an average of 40% increase in engaged followers and has created a space for two-way conversations that allow them to listen to what their audience has to say.
When asked about what advice he would give to others who see curated content as part of their content strategy, Gianfranco shared:
“In our digital era, curated content is emerging and increasing in its importance, due to all its potential applications particularly annexed to social media marketing. Brands and individuals have the opportunity to incorporate it into their strategies to optimize their efforts while being sure to provide [their audience] with high-quality material. My advice is to see curated content not just as a mere process or ‘operational opportunity,’ but to use it, transform it, and develop it, and make it become your priceless art!”
Gianfranco Capozzi, from the sunny island of Malta: Editor-in-Chief & Head of Esports for websites like Esports.net and other European portals dedicated to the exciting world of gaming. He is a Digital Marketer with over 7 years of experience in social media marketing and recruitment advertising. Passionate about Social Media trends, SEO and Content Marketing, he’s always on the lookout for innovative ways to achieve digital success. Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.