What is Content Curation? Everything You Should Know

Content curation is a major aspect of any content marketing initiative. It means finding and sharing relevant, high-quality content with your online community.      

Today, with so many platforms, the pressure of providing regular content to your audience is greater than ever. Taking the route of “content curation” helps you provide a wide variety of content to your customers, especially during the times you are unable to produce original content.  

The result?    

Your audience stays engaged. 

Moreover, content curation offers your customers only the “BEST” stuff as you do the hard work of sifting through a ton of material and choosing only the great ones in the end.  

Now that we have a brief idea about what content curation is, let’s explore it in more detail and learn how to do it the right way!

What is Content Curation?

Content curation is the process of selecting, collecting, packaging, and sharing content from the internet. Usually, curated content comprises a list of valuable resources on a particular topic, such as the “best of” lists you get to see every now and then. 

As per a study, 57% of marketers believe that content curation is the best way to continuously produce content. 

Content Curation Vs. Content Creation 

One can easily get confused between both these terms. The difference between content creation and curation is:  

Content creation and content production involves designing and promoting content pieces from scratch. The material you create can be of a variety such as videos, podcasts, or blogs.  

Content curation, on the other hand, involves searching for excellent content from other brands and sources. Hence, in this case, you don’t create your own original content. 

It may not come as a surprise when we say this – 

Curating content costs less than creating it. 

Infact, 35% of marketers are of the view that if you have budget constraints, content curation is the way to go!

What Makes Content Curation Useful?

There are a lot of benefits of curating content, such as:

1. Helps your customers know helpful information that they otherwise might not have known. 
2. It is typically faster than creating new content from scratch. 
3. Helps boost your visibility online. 
4. Sharing other people’s content helps you create relationships with them.
5. Boosts brand awareness and builds your audience.
6. Sharing high-quality, relevant content establishes you as a thought leader in your customer’s eyes. 

Pretty cool how curated content can be so helpful to you, isn’t it?

How Much Curated Content To Curate?

If we talk of your social calendar, it should contain the right content mix. According to Hootsuite, a good ratio to aim for is 60% curated content and 40% original content.

Curating Content The Right Way

You must focus on curating content like a pro if you want to effectively engage your audience. Follow these basic steps to curate content the right way:   

1. Understand Your Audience

If you don’t understand your potential customers, you won’t be able to find content that is relevant to them. Hence, a key part of the content curation process is to know your audience. Remember, content curation is more customer-focused. Therefore, you need to curate content they find extremely valuable and that also saves their precious time. For example, if you're a company offering mortgage loans or other products, then curating a high-quality first-time homebuyer guide will provide value for them helping them understand the basics.

Before scheduling curated content, ask yourself the following questions:

• How will this content piece help my target audience?
• Is it relevant to a common issue or problem they have?
• Does this align with how my audience perceives my brand?    

2. The Sources

You can curate content from various highly-authoritative sources, such as blogs, news outlets, publications, video streaming services, and social media updates. 

Note: Check out a plethora of sources to find the right information. Don’t just share from a single site.

3. Organize Into Categories

Organize your curated results into categories that grab the interest of your target audience. For instance, many companies can be seen sorting their curated content into categories like latest news, events, case studies, best practices, trends, etc.    

4. Credit Your Sources 

Don’t pass off curated content as something you made yourself. Give credit where it’s due. This means, you must tag and link to the original creator. 

Also, if you plan to share a compilation from a number of sources, ensure you credit each and every source in the piece. 

5. Share, Share, and Share 

Share the results of your curation efforts across different channels, such as blogs, websites, mobile app experiences, email newsletters, and social media feeds to get the most out of your curated content. 

Best Practices For Content Curation  

The different ways in which you can enhance your content curation strategy are:

1. Discuss about what you share and give your own point of view so that your unique brand voice shines through.
2. Content curation takes up a lot of time. To make things a little easier, you can always choose from the different content curation tools available out there. You can easily find the ones that fit your curation practices and needs. Some top content curation tools include Curata, Storify, PostPlanner, and TagBoard. 
3. Ensure to curate content in such a way that it can be shared across multiple platforms.   
4. Ensure to track your performance after you share. The engagement levels will let you know if you are sharing the right information.
5. Outsource content marketing if you think you will get better results from it rather than curating content yourself. If the latest content marketing statistics are to be believed, 75% of large organizations, 54% of medium-sized organizations, and 37% of small organizations state that they are outsourcing a part of their content marketing efforts. Here are 68 comprehensive content marketing stats for you to check out.

Wrapping it Up  

Content curation helps you cater to the increasing demands of information as well as entertainment from your customers. When done right, it can establish you as a thought leader, improve your SEO, aid lead generation, and complement your social media and blogging efforts. It can also help unlock networking opportunities and maintain conversations with your customers. 

But to do this, ensure that you curate content the right way. This means, you need to know your audience, choose from a variety of credible sources, organize your curated results into categories, and distribute and share it across multiple digital channels.  So, now that you know what content curation is and its examples, are you ready to leverage the power of curated content?