Content curation: a beginner’s guide with strategies and tools for your business
Selecting the right content and presenting it in the best way is essential to creating value for your audience on your blog or social media platforms and boosting engagement!
The best way to understand the idea of curation is to think of a curator and the exquisite exhibitions of an art museum.
The curator is the professional who collects and acquires the artifacts, stores them, and organizes them for public exhibition. The process of their activities from collection to exhibition is essentially to offer a meaningful experience to viewers.
For content curators, the process is much the same but focused on content. Selecting the right content and presenting it in the best way is essential to creating value for your audience, whether on your blog or social media platforms. And just like for art curators, the purpose of content curation is best served when your content speaks to your audience.
But there’s a lot that goes into content creation, from brainstorming ideas to publishing content online to addressing your audience’s pain points. So, what are these steps, and are there proven ways to optimize this content strategy for your marketing campaigns? In this blog post, we’ll tell you what you need to know about content creation and the best ways to implement this marketing strategy.
What does content curation mean?
Content curation is the process of finding, gathering, organizing, and presenting digital content around a specific topic or subject for a particular audience. A great way to understand content curation is by talking about what it is not.
Content curation is not about creating content (which is definitely important, too), nor publishing generic content for a wide, unspecified demographic. Rather, it is the art of filtering through content across the web and sharing the best articles, news, infographics, and videos on your social platforms.
The goal is to share content that both matches your brand identity and resonates with your target audience, with the aim of drawing attention to your brand values and projecting your brand as a thought leader in the industry.
Content curation offers plenty of benefits and serves as a great content marketing strategy.
With the high volume of information online combined with the short attention span of many readers, curating enables marketers to share valuable content for their target audience.
From using compelling statistics to posting articles from industry leaders on your brand’s social media, content curation is quite unlimited in scope — and so are the channels as you can share your content on blog posts, newsletters, and social media platforms.
It is worth remembering that aside from the basic steps involved in content curation — by this we mean finding content, organizing it, and posting it — there’s a vital step of content curation that is mostly left out by marketers. It’s not enough to share third-party posts; adding your take to these ideas is an essential aspect of content curation.
This helps to seamlessly integrate your brand voice into the curated content. Invariably, the curated content must also be credible and properly credited.
Brand visibility is a necessary goal for every business, and content curation makes this process easier. This is because nowadays, it’s not enough to simply repost random content and hope to generate organic engagement or go viral. It’s essential to know your audience and post consistent and high-quality content to attract and engage them.
Why is content curation important?
Content curation is a valuable marketing strategy for content creators, and it can help you build a business with loyal followers. With content curation, you get to:
- Find new content sources for your business to help you post consistently.
- Boost online visibility (SEO).
- Stay on top of industry trends.
- Provide valuable content to readers across various social channels.
- Share your opinions, reactions, and reviews on trending topics.
- Build your authority as an expert and project yourself as a thought leader.
- Attract new customers.
- Build trust with your audience, who’ll rely on your insights.
Below, we explore some of these topics in more detail:
Find new content sources for your business
While having an organized, full-time marketing team may be a given for some businesses, the story is much different for smaller groups. For such businesses, content creation is often a hard task, requiring a lot of time and effort.
With content curation, this doesn’t have to be the case. Posting consistently becomes much easier since you won’t have to stress about creating original content 24/7. The content is out there; all you need to do is find it, organize the vital points, add your unique idea to it, and hit ‘publish’.
Boost Online Visibility (SEO)
Finally, content curation drives SEO and online visibility. Content curation involves a considerable level of research on various content and websites, and a careful selection of content that ticks expertise, authority, and trust.
Also, curated content usually embeds outgoing links to authoritative sites and trusted sources. The result is high-quality content that ranks high in search engines, meaning higher traffic and better visibility.
Stay on top of industry trends
The process of content curation keeps you abreast of ongoing industry trends. For instance, if you’re an email marketing service, you can use the same keyword to track your competitors’ writing, industry reviews on the media, and other vital information you need to stay ahead of the pack.
Content curation exposes you to new topics, websites, publishers, and deeper insights. Ideas gleaned from this exposure can help you optimize your content marketing strategy and address your customer’s pain points as they evolve.
Project you as an authority and thought leader
Content curation gradually establishes you as a thought leader in your industry. In such a vast digital world, sharing high-quality and valuable information is a way to set yourself apart.
With time, you get noticed and become a thought leader in your own right.
Build trust with your audience
As an entrepreneur, an engaged audience is a staple for your online marketing campaigns. Content curation can help to create brand awareness and build an engaged audience by sharing content that stirs conversation that is tied to your brand.
Plus, sharing different kinds of content helps to achieve a balance, so your brand voice isn’t monotonous or boring.
Tips to use content curation in your marketing strategy
Content curation is an essential strategy for most content marketers. It involves more than re-sharing content, as curation allows you to add your insights to trending topics in your niche and create more value for your audience while building your authority in your area of expertise.
There are many steps involved in content curation. Below is a step-by-step guide on how to curate content for your marketing strategy:
Step 1. Research
The first step towards content curation is to research the various kinds of resources you would require for a given subject of interest. Research allows you to discover new content which you can utilize for your audience. To discover useful content while researching, you could decide to source for content from persons sharing similar information as your niche, or curate from others curators.
Step 2. Validate the sources
Validating your sources involves verifying whether your online sources are credible or not. According to studies, the best approach to validating your sources, is to identify the writer or organization listed as the source of the information and determine whether they are a respected authority on that subject or niche. Research their bios, read news about them online and check the sources they use. Verifying the accuracy of the information you repost is essential.
Step 3. Analyze the information gathered from your research
This is the step in which you separate the wheat from the chaff by deciding which content is best suited to the needs of your audience. Your market is focused on a particular area or niche, as such, preference should be given to valuable information that meets the target or expectations of your audience.
Step 3. Organize the curated content
Organizing curated content involves grouping your content in various ways that enables ease of access. Well-structured and organized content is easy to navigate. You can organize your content by grouping similar content together or through topic pages, topic maps, tagging, and recommendations. Always remember to post your own unique content too.
Step 4. Include your point of view
While content curation generally does not involve creating new content, it is also important to add your own unique touch to your curated content. People follow you because they like your takes on a given niche and not because you simply reposted them. While you don’t need to write lengthy takes, it is vital that they know what you think about the sources you shared.
Step 5. Tag the original source
Content curation is about content sharing, it isn’t content stealing or plagiarism or content scrapping. As such, always acknowledge the original source of the content. According to experts, you can do this by simply tagging the original creators by linking your source to the original source.
Step 6. Monitor your audience’s reaction to the content
After sharing the content with your audience, it is important to observe and gauge their reactions towards the content. You can do this by going through the comments on your page, and this will help you measure whether the content was well-received or not, if it was helpful or met their expectations, and also possible areas for improvements.
Top content curation tools in the market
Content curation tools are applications that assist in discovering and sharing relevant content to your audience. These tools help you sort, organize and even schedule curated posts in advance.
There are numerous content curation tools, and below are some content curation tools you can utilize for your posts:
Paper.li
Paper.li is a content curation tool that allows individuals to create newspapers and newsletters based on their chosen topics, and automatically discovers and publishes engaging content, pictures, and videos across the internet. The tool has features such as self-updating options, customized banners and call to actions, comments, add articles, pictures and videos gotten from every site you visit, etc.
Flipboard is a newsreader and virtual magazine tool, for both mobile and desktop devices, that allows you to produce min-magazines with links to your preferred news stories. One key feature of Flipboard is that it also doubles as a social network where participants can link up and discuss news interests.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a content engine that monitors global sources to help interested persons discover and curate content. It feeds your social channels with such curated content and has features such as generating personalized newsletters and aggregating content on multiple sites.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to organize and schedule your posts. Key features are automatic scheduling of your posts, performance reporting, social media monitoring, etc.
Pocket allows you save interesting articles, videos and other web content you may wish to consume or share at a later date. It has features such as suggested tags, unlimited highlights, premium fonts, comments, that allows you curate and enjoy your content according to specific topics.
Google Alerts
Google alerts is a content curation tool provided by Google, that sends content it discovers to your emails, based on specified categories of interests. It offers features such as notifications upon discovery of any content, keyword tracking, market data analysis, filter, website monitoring, etc.
Curata
Curata has two major software platforms: content curation software and content marketing software, and it uses machine learning, natural language processing, and AI, to power both platforms.
Add content curation to your strategy and deliver more value to your customers
In this article, we looked at the meaning of content curation and what’s in it for you. There are plenty of benefits to enjoy, so we shared tips and leading tools to help you build authority and attract loyal customers.
So, are you ready to up your online content game? Become an industry thought leader, while building an audience that understands your brand and engages your marketing campaigns? Give content curation a try!
Oh, if you want to learn more about attracting customers to your business, check out our blog post on Inbound Marketing.
