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June 7, 2021What Is Curated Content And How To Do It Right?
Have you ever wondered how much content people create on the internet in a single day? With most of us depending on the internet, it justifies the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that humans generate every 24 hours.
So wouldn’t it be nice to sometimes re-purpose some of that content for your audiences instead of coming up with new ideas?
Yes, it would. In fact, brands do it regularly.
It is a great digital marketing strategy that lets you add value to someone else’s content, present it with your perspective, and impress your readers with your knowledge about your industry.
Read ahead as we outline content curation, its importance, and how to do it correctly.
Table of Contents
What Is Curated Content?
Content curation refers to collecting and sharing relevant and valuable content that you do not create, unlike content creation, which is purely your and your team’s work. While you can add bits and pieces to it like some context, essentially, the core content you share isn’t your design.
With so much content online and the audience reacting well to it, content curation and creation significantly contribute towards an effective digital marketing strategy.
Content Curation Models
Here are the five models people use to curate content:
- Aggregation: It is the curation of the most suitable information regarding a specific topic into one place
- Distillation: It is the filtering of the most helpful information into an easy format to only share the relevant ideas
- Elevation: This is the curation for the identification of a more significant trend from the smaller daily posts
- Mashup: It refers to a distinct juxtaposed curation where you can form a new perspective with existing content
- Chronology: It is a curation form that links historical information overtime to show how a specific topic’s understanding evolves
Importance Of Content Curation
Curated content needs to be appropriately amalgamated with your existing content marketing strategy. But, before we learn how to do that, let’s find out why it is so essential for your marketing strategy.
1. Enhances Content Feed
Your gathered content can draw attention to your blog feed or social media in two ways:
- With the help of technology, you can add a mix of features to your content, such as voices, infographics, and opinions. This helps to make your content diverse and enables a broad audience to understand it
- Curated content adds more variety to the feed by utilizing a community-based tone rather than a self-centered one.
2. Provides Valuable Content
When you browse through social media, stay on the lookout for value-added content. Similarly, when you are a content creator or curator, you must keep in mind that your followers expect to see valuable and unique content related to your expertise. They count on you to provide different perspectives and information on pertinent matters.
Your followers are at the core of your brand and its growth, so you have to make sure you satisfy their need for helpful information and make them feel you are dedicated to providing them good content, be it your own or that of others.
3. Builds An Incomplete Content Calendar
Content marketing requires frequent content posts on different social media platforms throughout the week. Most of the content you post is created in-house, but using curated content is a great way to fill in your social media calendar gaps if need be. Even when you are short on your content, you can share that of others to maintain your posting schedule, as long as it quality content.
4. Helps Create A Network
When you share other’s content, it not just adds to your feed but also gets their attention as you send traffic to their site. Tell these creators that you find their content helpful and have shared it on your feed. However, don’t ask for a favor in return because that can put them off, and they’ll do so out of obligation.
Build the habit of networking by appreciating others’ work for organic relationships with your peers, so they help you out in the future with the goodness of their hearts.
Such interactions will form a healthier and long-lasting relationship instead of a transactional link based on favors and obligations.
5. Helps Create A Resourceful Feed
It might be challenging to be a thought leader when you share other’s content. However, if you share only high-quality content, your followers will learn to trust you and your website as a reliable source of information.
It is also a good idea to share your thoughts related to the curated content wherever you can. Be concise and clear with the opinion you add and offer a different perspective to sound like an authority on the subject matter.
As a result, even shared content will help grow you as a trusted source of information and perspective.
How To Curate Content The Right Way?
When you share some content, you have to be mindful of certain things to know that you share it with the right people, have trustworthy sources, share high-quality content, and how the content can help the audience.
Here are the few ways in which you can ensure these and curate content the right way:
1. Understand Your Audience
A good content marketing plan and content curation depend heavily on your audience research. In both cases, you have to understand the people you target to create and curate content accordingly.
Audience personas can help you determine what your target audience wants to see, so you can curate content that appeals to them the most. This helps you consider your audience as actual people and cater to their interests accordingly.
Understanding your audience is essential for content curation as well because you have to select the content they’ll like and share that on your social channels. Randomly selecting and posting content will do you no good and decrease your authority as a curator.
Determine how the content you share helps your audience and track your curated post’s engagement levels to see what type of content pleases followers. Use this information to select future content as well.
2. Add An External Link To The Original Source
Since you are sharing content and not stealing or plagiarizing it, it is essential to provide its source. Otherwise, it is unprofessional and illegal if you don’t credit the source when you share something.
Link out the content to the creator’s channel and tag them in your blog or social media posts. Share a little preview and direct your readers to the source to access the entire text.
Content curation is a great way to build a useful network, and the best way to do this is by being respectful of your peers and their content.
3. Add Your Perspective
People can get the content they share from other platforms or the primary source itself. However, they follow you to know your point of view about a specific topic relevant to your industry. As a result, any Instagram post or Tweet wouldn’t be fascinating to them without your opinion attached to it.
Stick to small and straightforward sentences explaining the reasons why your followers should read the post and how it can add value. Adding your insight will offer them another perspective.
4. Preschedule Posts
It will make your work significantly more manageable if you preschedule the curated posts whenever possible. Unless there’s a breaking news post that you have to share, you can have a daily posting schedule, so you don’t have to stay at your desk all the time.
Use free content curation tools for real-time post scheduling. This will truly make your life easy as you can schedule any useful post you come across directly from your browser.
5. Fact Check
With the vast access to the internet and social media platforms, it is very easy to come across false information. You have to be careful what you believe in and share with your followers because your brand’s reputation is also on the line with this.
Understand what you post and verify that the content is accurate and from a credible source. You don’t want to spread any misinformation and reduce your credibility too.
Content Curation Tools
Let’s look at some of the content curation software and tools that you can use to make content curation easier:
1. BuzzSumo
This is another tool that lets you find good content with industry-relevant keywords. You can also find the content with the most lasting engagement to ensure you share content that has eternal value instead of just being trendy at the moment.
Furthermore, you can find influential people with BuzzSumo to check their recent content and its value for your followers.
2. Hootsuite
This tool has a dashboard that can help you maintain a schedule to post your curated content. You can use industry-relevant keywords for an automatically updated content feed that you can use to create curated posts.
Once you have the content you want to share, use a Hootsuite Planner to publish the post at the right time.
3. Instapaper
Another resource that can help you save content in real-time is Instapaper. It also lets you comment and highlight text in all the saved articles. This is a useful feature because you’ll never forget an article’s unique perspective that makes it worth sharing.
The notes you make in real-time make it easier for you to curate content later on.
4. Twitter Lists
Twitter is filled with opinions, posts, and lots of valuable content that you might want to share on your social channels. While scrolling through the tweets can help you find content, Twitter Lists let you find share-worthy content.
It allows you to make a list of relevant creators whose content aligns the most with your audiences’ requirements. You can also create several lists for different content to have more options.
5. Google Alerts
Often you don’t want to look for content; instead, you want it to come to you. Here, you can create Google Alerts for industry-relevant keywords. This will give you email notifications whenever there is new content on the web using those keywords.
Create a filter for incoming emails to have these alert notifications in a separate folder instead of your inbox. This will help you have a space for curated content that you can use whenever you want to publish up-to-date posts.
Conclusion
Content curation is an advantageous yet sometimes tricky means to engage your audience on your social platforms. While content creation is your original work with a unique perspective, content curation requires you to add value to an already established piece of information through your opinion or explanation regarding the piece.
Sharing curated content on your social platforms is one of the best digital marketing strategies you can use in this digital age where so much content is being created and published daily. You can share so much with your perspective attached to it to prove to your followers that you have authority on the subject matter.
It is a straightforward way to garner more followers and build healthy relationships with others in the industry by sharing their content and driving traffic. This can be useful in the future when they return the favor genuinely.
He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.
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