What is Content Curation?
Content Curation is the collection and sharing of content like articles, images, videos, tweets, or other pieces of digital content.
Content curation is a process of discovery, storing, and target sharing. It doesn’t involve creating new assets.
Content curation is a route of carefully identifying, and sorting through the huge amount of content on the web around a specific topic.
It usually involves the collection of content relevant to a topic and sharing on a blog/website or social media, and giving credit to the original source.
Content curation can be any type of content found online such as news feeds, blog posts, podcasts, videos, infographic, or latest social media posts.
Curating content is one of the fastest, effective, and least time-consuming ways to create new content. Content curation is a popular and powerful strategy for improving content marketing.
A content curator does research on a specific topic, searching many articles, identification of good ones, organizing, and present to the audience while adding a point of view on the topic.
It’s not about collecting all the useless, irrelevant links that infect the Internet. It’s about arranging it into a piece of content with valid organization, and present as easy-to-access information.
There are a number of recognized approach to content curation:-
# Aggregation – Most-common form of curation to gather relevant information on a specific topic into a single location from different sources
# Distillation – Filtering information to only share valuable content on a highly-popular topic to relevant learners
# Elevation – Drawing conclusion on trends from seemingly less-important content or by analyzing social posts
# Mashup – Blending original pieces of content and curated content by adding your point of view to create a new message
# Chronology – Tagging and organizing chronologically different pieces of content or a timeline of events using links, social posts
Why is Content Curation Important –
Content curation is helpful in establishing brand identity, increase brand awareness, and developing relationships with customers and followers.
You can establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry by regularly sharing relevant and interesting content from other resources.
Curated content is a content that has been written by other people (mainly Influencers) in your industry.
It’s extremely effective and you can consider presenting a mix of your original content and curated content as part of your content offering.
When you decide to use some curated content, you’ll share the other person’s content and it’ll include your own content on that piece of content at the end of the article.
You must have an attribution line to ensure that the original author gets credits for his/her work otherwise it’ll be called plagiarism.
Content curation allows people to find quality content in an organized format based on specific areas of expertise.
Content curation is a technique to assists your target audience to stay informed about a certain area and find information about a niche topic.
Content curation allows you to provide extra value to your brand’s audience and to build a long relationship with customers.
The effective curation helps position as a thought leader in your industry and is an economical way to consistent publishing of quality content.
Curation is a big way to support a created content strategy and keep track of your preferred information sources.
How to Successfully Curate Content –
A content curator must regularly be on the lookout for relevant content. The curator should keep in mind that each piece of sharing content has the power to either increase or decrease its value.
The relevant content can develop a strong connection with the target audience. An irrelevant content should keep away the audience and it can hurt the brand’s reputation.
You need to be careful about content choices when it comes to the topics among curated articles. You must ascertain the frequency to post the curated content and where to share the curated content.
You can trust the curated content and must be having confidence in the sources of the content. The articles must be relevant to your readers and should have an essential human element.
It’ll help you to establish readers’ interest in reading. The content will be a source to improve your brand when you find interesting and relevant topics.
You can easily be on way to become an Influencer. You must find out what your readers want to read. You should ensure that the content is always relevant.
You have to put yourself in the readers’ shoes and the content will be good to deliver. There are many interesting ways to present content like videos, pages, and visuals.
It’s important to remember that words are great on the page, and people may also like visuals. Videos and graphic images can also work effectively for readers.
When you choose curated content, you have to be keeping in mind the following points:-
# Quality & Relevance – You should make sure that your publishing piece of content is of high value. You should get the bits and pieces from real industry experts. You can discard the questionable content.
# Add Value – You should add your inputs to what you are sharing. It’ll be going to more interesting, relevant, and value-added content. The selection of considerable artifacts like a museum curator for an exhibition adds value.
Similarly, you should find the best content, organize, and present that content collection in ways that make sense to your target audience. You can add an introduction that explains the article’s relevance to your particular readers.
You can add a call-to-action and identify the nest steps for your target audience. It’s a good place to link to a relevant ebook or blog posts to bring readers back to your original content.
# Attribute the Source – You must give attribution to the original source. You’d be accused of trying to pass-off others content as your own by readers.
You can share the original sources of content with your audience. You should give attribution for it preferably in the form of links to their website.
Benefits of Content Curation –
It helps your readers because they may not have the time or knowledge to grab a particular subject in which they may be interested in learning.
You can deliver your readers with valuable and educational information which will expand their knowledge base quickly.
Content curation offers relevant, appropriate, and timely content to the readers which are a value-added service.
# Thought Leadership – Curation shows that your business understands the issues affecting your customers. Content curation is a stepping stone to establish thought leadership which requires big efforts.
It indicates that you have invested the time and effort to share the best content.
You should add value to the curated topic by providing your own perspective through repeatedly and consistently in a broad manner.
# Educate Customers – Educations customers and perspectives is another benefit for brands via content curation.
This platform brings together three voices of the brand, staff, and industry experts. It’s an opportunity for the customers to hear other industry experts along with brands’ representation.
# Keep Social Streams Flow – Content curation is an important way to keep their social accounts regularly updated when their followers are interested.
Regular posts are crucial to keeping your followers engaged, and curated content sharing is a big move to keep the information flowing.
Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are excellent resources for curation. But you’ll need to cut through the noise and lower quality resources.
# Brand Awareness – Content curation websites have the opportunity to bounce-up quickly and vibrate widely within their niche.
When people see your website everywhere, then they start to gain awareness of your brand. Your audience will see the scope of your expertise and your website will send the trust signal to rely on you.
By regular posting, the most relevant articles, infographics, and videos on your topics will develop a resource for know-how and information.
It’ll improve your credibility and trust. Your perception as an expert and thought leader will increase your reputation.
# Accelerates Content Production – Curating content is very fast as compared to building each piece of content.
Curating relevant content from various valuable sources in your industry will provide a content consistency of fresh content.
You can increase the frequency of publishing content while at the same time improving original content with your own resources by curating third-party content.
You can stay in touch with your followers even when you don’t have original content in stock. Social media channels with a consistent flow of relevant content will ensure better engagement with your followers.
# Influencer Relationship – By sharing content from others, you show that you care about their expertise and opinion.
Curating content from established leaders and influencers in your industry will help to create influencer relationships.
You can draw the influencers’ attention to your blog, brand, or business by sharing their social media posts, quotes, and credit them by handles.
Promoting influencers posts can be a starting point to establish a long-term beneficial influencer relationship.
The relationships you build with other influencers in the space by showcasing their work are a happy by-product of content curation. Curation creates symbiotic relationships when you are done with the right proper attribution.
Content Curation Methods –
Content curation can be carried out either manually (done by designated curator) or automatically (done by different methods) or by the combination of both.
# Collaborative Filtering – Collaborative filtering is a method of forecasting used in recommendation systems. It’s based on the saying that past evaluations of users are predictive of future evaluations.
Collaborative filtering can be based on either on votes and views of a social community (Reddit or Digg), or the end user’s own prior activity (YouTube or Amazon).
# Semantic Analysis – This method uses the principles of factor analysis to analyze the relationship between the studied phenomena and objects.
Semantic analysis scrutinizes the relationship between the various elements and sources of information found in a given document.
It compares a few factors or all the information sources topics and terms. This approach is implemented by Stumbleupon which break up content according to topic, subtopic, and category.
# Social Rating – It finds someone with interests similar to the end-user and bases its recommendations on their activity. It’s widely used on social networking websites like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, etc.
The social ranking parameters are generally based on actions such as shares, votes, likes, etc. The higher there are such activities in a shorter time, and content gets the higher rating.
Content Curation Tools –
A content curation tool will help to schedule sharing, spreading publication across to provide a steady flow of content to your followers.
There is a large number of tools for the content curation which are helpful to separate good article from bad:-
# Curata – It’s a comprehensive business-grade and SaaS-based content curation solution. It offers brands the ability to curate content using domains, keywords, and phrases.
It can automate many tough tasks like search, organizing, and publishing. It’ll give you centralized control of human tasks such as evaluation, contextualizing, and approval.
# Pearltrees – It’s a content storing platform which meant to help you discover and store content in your own collection.
This tool allows searching for content collections related to your own interests and discovering saved articles and resources of other users.
# Trap.it – It’s content curation and social selling service that helps you manage employee advocacy and much more.
Here, you can discover relevant content within minutes to be shared via email, LinkedIn, or social media. It can deliver fresh content to employees. This tool allows for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics integration.
# DrumUp – It’s smart content curation and social media management tool which uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning algorithms to discover relevant content.
It allows you to edit posts for recommended content and scheduling it for sharing on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You can connect your blog feed to social accounts and store interesting posts to a custom content library.
Conclusion – Content curation is an essential component of a content marketing strategy and it’s a big task to manage. Using curated content is a big move as long as you mix it with original content. It’s valuable content to which you’ve added your human touch. Content curation can prove to be a powerful technique in driving social media engagement.