Content curation must be a part of each social media and content marketing strategy. It’s a strategic marketing directive that focusses on creating, curating and distributing relevant, consistent, and valuable content to draw and retain a targeted audience.
Content marketing isn’t only about writing blogs and publishing, although that’s their core. It’s also about content sharing. It’s not a cakewalk and getting others to notice your content can be tough, especially if you’re a small brand or are just starting out.
Sometimes, you don’t have the knowledge, time, or budget to tailor content for everything. That’s where and when content curation kicks in. It’s about sharing relevant content that doesn’t necessarily have to be your own.
Social media is brimming with amazing content, with countless people, who are at the zenith of their industry, creating them with in-depth insights into things your audiences look for and care about.
Sharing that content with that particular audience is important. This is content curation. Content creation and curation are pivotal ways to build trust. Hence, knowing their worth/significance and striking a proper balance between each part is crucial.
Content curation also builds authority and trust.
Ruling Over Social Media
Content curation becomes more and more pivotal as brands are noticing that catering to their customers’ limited time and scope is a sure way to add value to their needs and lives. You also build relationships with your consumers in this way.
- It’s not confined to just creating. It’s all about finding, aggregating and rating.
- Many businesses use content curation on their blogs and websites to promote industry-specific news, but social media is the leading marketing avenue where curation is at its peak.
- Social media content curation occurs when a marketer or brand filters through each interesting and worthwhile content online, sharing the best images, video, news, and so on the person finds online on the firms’ social networks.
- Marketers curating content are invariably bringing more order and utility to the social web. Resultantly, you can add a standpoint and voice to companies and organizations that can connect with consumers.
- It creates an entirely new window of dialogue, which depends on valued content and not brand-tailored marketing gimmicks.
When your audience views you as an industry leader, they’re more likely to buy your products and services. That’s why B2C brand use curated content on their social networks, Instagram and Pinterest to earn new users/followers and demonstrate their mettle with viral-worthy content/posts. In addition, another tactic is to get organic followers from sites like Blastup.
Steps to Curate Content
You must decide how much content you want to curate. Your first step is imbibing the golden ratio of curated and original content. It includes what proportion of content can be original, and how much you’ll curate from someplace else.
- You can figure out the ratio as per the network. For example, you curate less content on Instagram than you do on Twitter.
- There’s no absolute answer to the amount of content you should curate, but curation tools have found that top content marketers in the circuit are using 65% original content, 25% curated content and around 10% of syndicated content.
The second step is creating topics or categories for the content you’re curating. If you don’t, you’ll end up repeating the same content as a spiral.
- Depending on your brand, there are a few different paths to take. Some brands only share content that caters only to their industry.
- There are others that diversify. As you can probably guess, data storage is not the most visually captivating industry. So, rather than confining themselves to a fold, they are expanding to other spectrums with curated content.
Finding your sources and doing manual research is also very important.
Prominent Content Curation Software and Tools
For beginners, Buzzsumo can be a great tool. If you want to know what leading influencers are sharing, Buzzsumo can help you find out the most shared internet content. You can find it for specific topics. It shows you the top 10 social media influencers for a brand/topic, along with what they are sharing. The price is $79-$559 per month.
Twitter lists are another fabulous tool. When Twittering gets messy and meddlesome, especially if you aren’t organizing the accounts you’re following, you can use Twitter Lists to respond to followers and share, regardless of how many of them you actually have. Lists help to segment and to organize your audiences. You can engage with them in categories.
Pocket is another stunning tool. You can save stories, videos, and articles from any app, page or publication, and from any device. It’s better than using innumerable emails or laundry list for bookmarks that you send to yourself with an array of links.
The pocket keeps every interesting video, article, and image in one place. As you know, capturing information and collecting it is the first step of curation sharing.
More on the Tools
Flipboard is a desktop and mobile app, allowing you to create stellar mini-magazines with neat links to your most favorite blog posts, websites, or news stories. After creating these magazines, you open them to the public. Other users can then follow your posts and even share them on their social media channels.
- If you want to show that you’re a hot trend and news junkie, you can create your Flipboard account.
- Start making magazines that your followers might like. Place news links from publications they like.
- You can also place your blog links or posts into Flipboard content so that people reading the stories can also learn about your brand.
Pocket is a superb place to accrue content, before saving and sharing it for later users. You can group your best articles and blogs with tags. The website’s inbuilt search feature makes finding your content easy.
Additionally, it integrates with 500 plus apps for seamless and smooth integration. It’s much akin to Evernote in this regard.
Final Thoughts
Content curation is crucial for any social media/content marketing strategy. If you are looking to boost the traffic to your site or engagement on your site or social platforms content curation is a great place to start.
Featured image credit: Unsplash.com
Ariya Stark is a notable management consultant and digital marketing expert. She is an experienced digital marketer and has helped e-commerce businesses in all niches gain with her effective marketing strategies and guidance.
