Content Curation Guide: Tips & Strategies
Content Curation, in simple terms, is to discover, gather and present web content based on their specific subject matter. The concept is age old – we are prone to collect and catalogue the best of human inventions and have looked at those as the right sources of knowledge to solve our needs.
Content Curation has become essential in the age of Internet. In fact, it has every potential to bring more order and utility to the social web. In addition, it will add voice as well as point of view to businesses, connecting them with customers. This, in turn, will create a communication channel based on valued content instead of marketing messages created by brands.
Types of Content Curation
Content Curation is classified into five categories:
Aggregation
This practice involves curating the most relevant content into one single location. Aggregation is widely practiced when it comes to Content Curation. Most of the online service providers use this form of content curation.
Content curation examples (Aggregation)
- SERPs ( search engine result pages). These are the pages that Google and other search engines display when you seek information.
- News feeds (RSS). This is concise index of content that are distributed on a regular basis.
- Hashtags.
- Curated playlists on YouTube Channels – Example: Digital Marketing full length class recordings
Elevation
In this practice, a more general insight or trend is drafted from a mass of regular content published online.
Content curation examples (Elevation)
Analyzing a daily / monthly trends of Covid in India & collecting data from various sources and coming up with a piece of opinionated or researched article/ thorough report backed by those data.
Distillation
As the name suggests, this practice distill the noise about a specific topic to the most relevant and important concept. Most of the social content curation follows this practice.
Content curation examples (Distillation)
Summarizing longer contents into clear brief pointers.
Chronology
This practice follows the chronological order. It is also termed as historiographical content curation. It presents the curated information based on a timeline, showing the evolution of the topic.
Content curation examples (Chronology)
Example: Google ranking algorithm updates
Mashups
This is the practice of merging different content that deal with a specific topic. It helps to create a new and unique point of view for the same topic.
Content curation examples (Mashups)
Mashup video – Bollywood love mashup 2021
A large number of tools and sites provide content curation service. However, it needs one essential skill on your part – your ability to filer the content. And to do so, you need to listen what people are discussing out there i.e. the hot trends and the buzzwords on the Internet.
The best way to listen what people are discussing is through Twitter and RSS feed. While the micro-blogging site will help you to track relevant content that people are posting, RSS will help you track content production of the sites where you have subscribed.
Coming back to Content Curation, there are several sites and tools to help you in the process. Some of these include Scoop.it, Storify, Bundlr, and Pearltrees. The last site mentioned here is widely gaining popularity among content marketers.
Now if you are thinking why you should consider curating content in the very first place, keep your eyes open for our next post. In the meanwhile, don’t forget to check the aforementioned sites for Content Curation and let us know if you find some other resources.
Content Curation Tools
The Perfect Content Cocktail
General Content curation guideline
- 65% original content.
- 25% curated content.
- 10% syndicated content.
Social Content Curation Guideline
- ⅓ personal brand promotion.
- ⅓ curated content.
- ⅓ social conversations.
Why You Need To Curate Content
Learn why you need to curate content. Importance and benefits of content curation. Content curation facilitates branding & helps your search engine efforts
In our last post, we discussed about what is content curation and its categories. Now we would discuss why you need to curate content. A content curation helps you pull videos, images, presentations, tweets, blog posts and other web content into a bundle which you can then easily embed and share on the web. Now if you are wondering you should you consider content curation as a part of your online marketing plan, here are a few points:
Content curation helps to conquer long-tail keywords
Content curation enables you to have a dedicated section curating the best relevant content to your specific market. This way, you can optimize and enhance the long tail keywords for your site. All you need to do is discover and curate the content, provide perspective and add value commenting and credit the sources.
However, don’t forget to mention the source otherwise you would be pushing duplicated content onto the site, which will cause the wrath of the original author and you are likely to get panelized by major search engines as well. Yu can use the online tools to export the feed of your curated content into your website, making the whole process easier.
Content curation helps in finding link building contacts
We all know the value of link building, when it comes to SEO efforts as well as the amount of trouble we have to go through to find valuable link building contacts. However, content curation helps you to find quality contact for link building.
In fact, it is almost natural effect of this online marketing strategy. When you discover and share the best, relevant content about your niche market, other content creators are likely to follow your site closely. This helps you to build credibility and you can leverage upon this credibility for link building.
They are more likely to mention about your curated content, providing you a back link. You can even contact them to create business collaboration with them. There is another way to leverage upon this marketing trick. You can submit original content to those content creators as guest writer and ask for a link back to your site.
Better yet, you can create the original content based on your curated content and cite your sources to obtain links back from them.
Curated content can be your source for original content
In continuation to the previous point, content curation helps you to find and collect relevant and quality content that can be re-used later. In fact, you can have access to great ideas and information to create quality original content, but again do mention the original source.
Another advantage of using curated content is that you are not limited to online content for reference purposes. There are various offline sources offering industry specific content, which can be easily collected and curated.
It allows to obtain social signals
Content curation, if it is well executed, will surely attract readers. Simultaneously, it will generate lots of social mentions in form of tweets, shares and likes. People like to share or repost content that they find interesting and valuable.
Thus, curating relevant and insightful content is likely to obtain social signals. In addition, content related to general market trends attract a lot of links and citations. Similarly, tender photosets too obtain better results, especially from social networks like Facebook and photo sharing sites.
Content curation facilitates branding
Content curation platforms help you in branding your business by creating a qualified presence in those sites. In fact, the explosion of Pinterest is one of the best examples how content curation can help in creating brands.
However, you should be very active on those sites and practice content curation wisely. This allows you to be participative with other content curators; thus, you can enhance and demonstrate your thought-out knowledge of brand. It also helps in achieving higher search engine ranking as well as in managing online reputation issues. Better yet, content curation helps in obtaining constant flux of organic traffic.
It allows you to become an authoritative reference in your niche industry
Content curating is the best option if you want to become an authoritative source for your specific industry. And you can use the social media profiles to share the valuable content with the world. This will help you to become one of the most trusted and valued reference in your industry.
In fact, becoming an authoritative source was never easier. With content curation you can share and credit the best sources, as a result people will look at you as a reliable source for relevant information.
Also, other content curators that you have mentioned are more likely to mention you and refer to your content. Google and other search engines too will start taking you as an authoritative source for information about your niche.
In conclusion, content curation helps your search engine efforts.
You can use the content curation sites actively to increase the value of your site to Google and other major search engines. This alone can help you to obtain authority and relevance in the web. Also, you can have more relevant organic traffic to your site, thanks to the ability of this marketing strategy to conquer long-tail keywords. However, make sure you mention the original source to avoid being penalized by Google as well as the original author.
Curate Content for Social Media Benefits
What you need to do is curate content for your social media marketing to get the social media crowd buzzing. It’s not an easy task and needs planning & tool.
I’m presuming that you post and update content on social media regularly. Even individual users who have nothing to do with social media marketing do it! However, the avalanches of posts you upload rarely take down online leads. Casual users may troop in once in a while to check your website or landing pages and that’s about it. The reason is clear as daylight: content saturation. Your social media wall itself is swarming with posts and uploads you will never ever check out. Your brand’s posts are making the same impression on people’s social walls.
What you need to do is curate content. Just as an art curator would do for a museum, you have to handpick the stories and posts that will see the light of day on your brand’s page. It is the job of a social media editor, deciding what gets published and what doesn’t. A content curator on social media needs to have several qualities, some of which we will discuss in this blog post. The foremost quality among them is the ability to understand the target group of your consumers and their psyche.
Now you may assume that you know all there is to know about the tastes and preferences of your consumers. That is a very risky assumption to make, unless you have your eyes and ears to the ground at all times. Consumers change their choice very quickly, especially in a highly competitive market. Other brands may be offering them something of greater value for their time and money. You need to match up and beat them, if possible. A social media content curator has to keep up and beat the trend with unfailing regularity.
When you are a content curator, you often pick stories from sundry sources. That does not mean that you will end all original posts. There is little sense in mindlessly tweeting or retweeting links. You need to find relevance in the content you share. That will build up trust among your users. They will rely on your page for their fill of daily content. It is the Holy Grail of a content curator: being the trusted source of information and opinion maker. Take this trust responsibly and your existing users will surely get you more viewers and eyeballs.
As you know, the sheer volume of content available online is enough to drown out anyone trying to curate them manually! You will probably spend the whole day sifting through pages of content without making any serious headway. The automated weapons will not help you as that would totally defeat the purpose of a curator on the job. The ideal way out is to single out various sources of content, like some blogs, web pages, news feeds, and the like. You know them to be excellent sources for content that finds relevance with your brand. Glean links from these pages to keep the standard in place.
You can team up with co-curators for better content publishing on social media. You are engaging with partners for link exchanges or guest posts. There is no harm in taking this collaboration to the social media platform. Let your co-curators suggest content links and you return the favor. Additionally, you have the unique opportunity to reach out to a wider group of readers available online when your co-curator’s audience taps into your circle. You will find like-minded curators when you pick up brands with similar audiences as yours. They may not necessarily be competitors. A simple example: a pencil seller can co-curate with a sharpener seller without harming anyone’s interest in any way!
It is a tall task to get the social media crowd buzzing. Thanks to predatory social media marketing, people are wary of digital marketers on Facebook or Twitter. Most keep us marketers blocked too often! It’s time to play the game according to the tastes of the spectators. That will set up new, probably game-changing, dynamics in the game.
You can chime in with your views here and we can talk it over!
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Didn’t find such detailed and complete information on content curation anywhere else. This helped me a lot.
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