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When it comes to art, painters, and sculptors are the ones who create the pieces but it’s up to the curators to select which ones belong to exhibits and museums. This is also the same for content marketing – although there are algorithms that show relevant content to readers, content curators are still needed to pick only the best content to share with the audience.
Content curation is a valuable process that many digital and social media marketers include in their marketing strategy. It’s more than just about sharing content from other creators – content curation also offers more value to target audiences while highlighting the brand’s knowledge and expertise in its own industry. By using content curation in the right way, you can also become a go-to source of information in your niche.
Sharing curated content is often a part of the content marketing strategy for many businesses, but it’s an entirely different thing from content creation. Creating content requires content marketers to write, make, publish, and promote their own content from scratch.
On the other hand, curating content entails looking for the best stuff from other people’s content rather than developing original quality content. As social media algorithms learn to reward brands and businesses that have the highest engagements, content curation proves to be an important strategy to offer readers the relevant content and constant value that they need.
About 4.76 billion people worldwide are active users of different social media platforms, which makes social media an indispensable part of most marketing strategies. But for brands that can’t afford an in-house social media team yet, curating content may be a viable content strategy to help them grow their company, elevate their brand, and reach more audiences.
Content curation is an intentional strategy that brings significant benefits to businesses as long as it’s done right. It means finding and sharing high-quality content that’s relevant to audiences while being aligned with the brand message and strategy.
Social media marketing is about using different social media accounts and platforms to build relationships with customers, drive more traffic to the brand’s website, and increase the sales of certain products and services. There are many tools and strategies that businesses use to achieve these goals, but content curation remains to be one of the best practices for any company.
When marketers curate content, they don’t just randomly share, post, or retweet them using their social media accounts. They think through every relevant content, topic, or idea and take the time to find hidden gems all over the web before telling their audiences to check out a particular content.
A lot of brands might be thinking: “Isn’t this just stealing content from additional resources and other people?” But the answer is no because brands aren’t sharing others’ content and presenting it as their own – when teams curate content, they always link it to the original source and cite them. Curated content helps brands become thought leaders in their industry while amplifying the reach of their partners whose content is featured.
Successful content curation is a tried and tested strategy that social media marketers use to boost the brand, expand the pipeline, and save resources in the ever-evolving social media space. Here are some of the best benefits of content curation that businesses should know about:
There aren’t strict guidelines that tell content marketers what kind of content to curate or how often they should share the best stuff from other people. But most successful brands have a content curation strategy they developed through years of trials and research that helped them reach their business goals.
About 85% of B2B marketers agree that curated content contributes to the success of their organization, along with original content and syndicated content. It’s all about finding the right balance for the business to reap the full benefits of content curation.
Here are some of the best practices to try for the brand as it looks for additional resources to curate:
Knowing the audience and what they want or need is true for any marketing strategy. As brands curate content for a specific topic, they need to think about how it aligns with the interests and preferences of audiences. Before you publish or share curated content, make sure to ask these questions first:
As you publish the curated content, take a step back and think about how it fits into the content strategy. No matter how good the curated blog post is, it won’t work if it doesn’t answer the first 3 questions above. Remember that there are still other pieces of great content on other websites that also align with the brand, just waiting to be discovered.
One of the most important things to remember when curating content is that it’s about featuring other people’s work – not stealing or plagiarizing them. Always remember to give credit where it’s due by tagging and linking the original content creator in the blog post.
Never claim that curated content is yours because it’s wrong. Plagiarism can tarnish the reputation of the brand in the eyes of audiences and search engines. Algorithms can detect when a duplicate shows up so they tend to rank it lower than other articles, no matter how reliable the information it has.
Tagging the original creators is as simple as putting their usernames on platforms like Instagram or Twitter. If the compilation of curated content is from different sources, mention it to audiences with a small preview then add the links of the full videos, articles, or other types of content. Always make sure to credit every source in all the brand’s posts.
This isn’t a requirement every time brands publish curated content, but readers appreciate it when they share something useful. It doesn’t even have to be paragraphs long – just a sentence or two is enough to introduce the curated content and why the audience may find it helpful.
Brands may also quote from the content they found and create an image to emphasize a certain point. This catches the eye of audiences and allows them to subtly associate the brand with the industry expert they’re quoting.
One excellent example of this is Hootsuite’s thread about keeping a close eye on the creator economy. Each tweet contains an image with a quote from the original blog post and a caption that voices their own thoughts about the content.
Swipe files are collections of copywriting and marketing examples that marketers use to draw inspiration for their next campaign. It’s a useful ongoing list of what people share and talk about on different social media platforms. Even if brands aren’t sure how to utilize certain pieces of content yet, it’s still nice to have a list of topics and posts ready to go when they need it.
One way to make a swipe file is by creating a folder of bookmarked pages on the internet browser. Other brands also utilize curation tools like Pocket, Evernote, and Scoop.it when making their own collection. Another pro tip is to search platforms like Twitter and Instagram using hashtags to find content that’s trending or has the potential to be viral.
Subscribing to industry email newsletters is also another way to keep an eye out for the best content to curate. These emails usually highlight the best articles written by a particular organization every week or month.
Lots of brands use content curation to save time when building their authority and reaching more audiences without creating their own original content. Although publishing curated content is a good way to fill the spot of a forgotten social media post, it’s also important for content curation itself to have a schedule.
Adding content curation to the brand’s content calendar allows them to see any gaps in their strategy and fill them with the appropriate tactics. When brands curate content regularly, they keep customers engaged and interested because they regularly produce posts.
Having a fixed schedule also allows the team to find the best content and curate it accordingly instead of just sloppily putting together every content they see. It also provides brands an insight into the best times to post each content based on certain metrics.
One effective way to keep readers and customers engaged is to diversify the type of content to publish. Readers appreciate every original and new content by the brand, but some of them also prefer other content forms like a video, podcast, ebook, or other curated pieces of content from influencers and industry experts.
When mixing curated posts into the strategy, brands shouldn’t worry about it overshadowing some of their original content. According to Hootsuite, a good ratio that brands should aim for is 60% curated content and 40% of their own original content.
However, brands should keep in mind that the 40% should be high-quality, fully original, and actionable content. Original content is what attracts audiences while curated content is what keeps them engaged.
With the influx of new content flooding the internet and other channels every day, it’s easy to get drowned and carried away before readers can sort everything out and find posts that are relevant to them. It’s up to the content curators to do the hard work of exploring everything within their niche and selecting those that seem to be the most valuable for the audiences.
But this kind of job involves more than just finding and parroting links – a good content curator should also:
Like content creation and email marketing, content curation is also a useful tool to gather more audiences and improve the authority of different blogs. With this strategy, you’re doing a great service to the readers by doing the research, finding the best stuff, and pulling them together for easier perusal.
Content curation is also a great help to the content team because it allows them to develop and put together thoroughly sourced content in a much shorter period. Regardless of the company size or industry, content curation should be a part of a brand’s overall strategy to become an indispensable name to its customers.
