Content Curation.
Of Marketers Curate a Portion of Content
Moving Beyond Content Generation
The current state of search engine ranking algorithms have evolved to ensure that Search Engine Optimization requires a large amount of high quality content to be generated on websites in order to do well. And, on any other communication channel it will be necessary to do the same. This means in your newsletters, social media posts and public relations as well. That is an awful lot of content to generate on your own and the best marketers understand different ways of curating content to avoid spending valuable time coming up with brand new ideas all the time.
Christina Cisnero explains the difference between content curation and traditional content generation in a recent Hootsuite article, A Beginner’s Guide to Content Curation. She says, “content curation is very different from content marketing. Content curation doesn’t include creating new content; it’s the act of discovering, compiling, and sharing existing content with your online followers.” This process includes finding interesting, relevant information and putting it together in a curated manner that provides a new perspective or added value to the original information. In many cases, you may be bringing in different information from many sources and putting together the ‘big picture’ for your readers.
A Couple of Strategies on Obtaining New Content
For those of you who love using Google products, one of the oldest and most common strategies here is to setup Google Alerts for topics in your area of interest and have them send you daily or weekly updates. If you prefer a more sophisticated service where you can select multiple keywords, and even negative keywords, you may want to try Content Gems. Of course, overlooking Facebook and Twitter would be a big mistake.
Ultimately, you have many ways to get new content to share. So, first grasp these basics and get to know how it works. Then, follow the deeper strategies we discuss later in this article.
Things to Remember When Curating Content
Ross Hudgens, on ContentMarketingInstitute.com, explains three things that can’t be overlooked when efficiently curating content for your readers:
He starts by explaining the importance of finding content that is not readily available to anyone in your industry. The reason for this is that if your readers are following you, they may also be following other leaders in your field. So, for you to curate information they have already seen, you are already losing value to them – no matter how profound your insight may be. Since your focus should be on getting new content that they have not seen yet, you need to find overlapping outlets that may not always provide insight directly on your usual topics. It is your job to locate that information and get it to them quickly.
When it comes to finding a way to frame your content, it is really quite easy. First, you need to find something interesting to share, then you need to show why it is important. The worst thing you can do is auto-share one of your favorite information providers. If you think this is a good idea, please check your Twitter feed and see how many of the same posts you find with the exact same title. There is no reason a follower would stop and read your post unless maybe you change the title or headline to be something that entices them to read on.
If you can get noticed for expanding upon a writer’s work, they are likely to share the updated information with their followers. This can rapidly boost your digital presence by getting more traffic and sharing of your curated content. But, in order to do that, you most likely need to alert the original writer of your updates. You should do this by reaching out via website comments, email, Twitter, Facebook and more. If you re following them, they are much more likely to support you as well.
A Note on Curating this Article
We have already been contacted and asked if the information in this article can be curated for other marketing websites. The answer is yes! We not only support the sharing of this information, but we were only able to create it ourselves by curating interesting information by other marketing experts. Of course, be sure to add links as we did above. Good luck!