Many people regard content curation as a way to fill your website or blog with quality content without creating it. True, curation involves using content created by others, but it by no means is simply copying or reposting it. Curation is a very creative task that requires a lot of research and subject-matter expertise. When done right, it can give your content an interesting new angle and attract more visitors to your website.
Curation can become an important part of your content marketing strategy together with audience research, unique content creation, and using advanced tools, such as chatbots and AI, to enhance your user experience. Curation means sharing content created by others and accompanied by your own opinions or conclusions.
There are many ways to curate content:
- Aggregated statistics gathered by reputed sources
- Thematic directories with your annotations
- Playlists collected according to a specific topic
- Article or blog post shares with your view on the subject
- Organized reading lists
Simply put, curated content is a creative way to say “Hey, look what a cool story I found!” and share it with your audience.
Importance of content curation
By compiling and collating interesting and relevant content, you are getting multiple benefits:
- Expand your audience. When you share content produced by others with due appropriation, you get a chance to reach out to your source’s audience, too. If you complement the curated content with professional analysis and expert opinions, some of the other author’s followers may start following you, too.
- Establish your opinion leadership. If your view on curated content is well-grounded and based on solid knowledge of the field, your reputation as a thought leader gets stronger.
- Generate more leads. Smartly curated content increases traffic to your website with a chance to get more sales leads. For instance, comparison articles, this one, can be a good way to attract more leads. While looking for the best option to go with, a user may become interested in your offer as well.
- Improve customer experience. Your website visitors are going to enjoy interesting compilations and professional reviews of other authors’ content. Expert research of online resources is especially important in creating B2B customer experiences, as this sector is very demanding as to the quality of content.
- Save time and resources. Content curation takes less time than creating unique content from scratch.
6 content curation strategies and tools
As we mentioned, content curation is not limited to simply reposting it on Instagram or something that you find interesting. It requires detailed planning and careful execution to achieve its goal.
A couple of words on content curation tools. Today, any marketer worth their salt uses a bunch of tools that help to automate and accelerate the flows. A solid marketing campaign would include a chatbot adding automation to user communication, tools to drive social media engagement, customer support tools, and a CRM to connect all of them into a single system. A good marketing manager knows that an email design system can speed up email production, and that content curation is much easier with advanced tools.
In this post, we gathered six content curation strategies that can drive more audience to your website and six tools that can help you achieve that goal.
Look at a popular topic from another angle
Find a popular, viral topic in which you are an expert and provide a different view on it. The audience is already highly engaged, and your opinion may bring people to your website or blog out of curiosity.
The key thing is to be a true expert, of course. This way, you can not only attract people’s attention but also make them your followers for a long time, as they will expect more interesting content from you.
Tool: UpContent
The first step is to find a topic within your field of expertise that is hot right now. UpContent can help you with this and many other content curation tasks using advanced machine learning algorithms:
- Analysis of multiple articles on the selected topic
- Automation of curation processes
- Compliance with your internal rules
Discover new interesting topics
Sometimes, you can reach your audience engagement goals by finding a topic that is not in the focus of attention right now. For instance, if your business is about eCommerce, you can focus on specific topics, such as what is a headless commerce or composable commerce platform rather than discussing general topics that have been discussed many times. By bringing it into the limelight accompanied by your expert comments or reviews, you can spike users’ curiosity and interest. As a result, they may begin following you, wishing to learn more on the subject.
Tool: Google Alerts
A tool from Google’s family, Google Alerts crawls the web looking for new articles on the defined topic. It will inform you of any new posts on the selected subject, allowing you to respond quickly and be among the first who brought a new topic into focus.
Schedule and time your posts
Of course, not all your content should be curated. A larger share of your posts and articles should be original with, maybe, a quarter being curated. Statistically, most businesses share content by other authors once a week.
Thus, your curated content needs careful timing and scheduling, just like any other material that you choose to publish as part of your marketing effort. Since it helps to optimize your time and resources, you can schedule it so that you keep your usual posting rhythm while taking a break from writing your own articles or creating unique videos.
Tool: Sociality.io
Sociality.io is a complete social media management platform that helps you time and schedule posts, analyze the competition, automate social media flows, and measure your performance. With this tool, you can schedule your curated content in advance to post it at the most appropriate time.
Use multiple channels to distribute curated content
While your target audience may define the most optimal channels to use for your content, you may experiment with other channels to attract other segments of audience. When you share something created by other authors, you might also venture into an unusual channel.
Choose distribution channels according to the type of content you publish. For example, an infographic or image may do well on Pinterest and a list or collection of statistics can be posted in a series of tweets.
Tool: Flockler
Flockler is your single social media control center. It allows managing your social media postings on different channels and creating continuous feeds that can be displayed anywhere – on your website or on digital screens during events. You can use Flocker to balance your unique and curated content, putting together engaging social media feeds.
Post different types of content
Try not to focus only on the type of content that you find the most fitting for your style. Even if your favorite content is detailed longreads, include other types in your posting schedule, such as videos or short tweets, especially if you followed our previous tip and used various channels.
With such an approach, you will maintain user engagement and, at the same time, attempt to expand your audience by offering content preferred by other groups.
Tool: Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a powerful content curation tool, allowing you to build pages of various curated content and distribute them automatically via multiple channels. The tool also monitors the internet space for topics that are relevant to you and brings a fair degree of automation into your content curation flows.
Organize your content
You can take content curation one step further and make complete stories or magazines out of it. By organizing your curated content, you engage visitors, making them look forward to your next posting.
Make sure to implement good SEO writing techniques in your curated content because it is critical to follow the technical aspect of content creation in addition to trends of visually appealing content and what is currently contextually important.
Your stories can be a smartly organized mixture of curated and unique content, showing your industry expertise and giving you the opportunity to express your views on popular topics.
Tool: Flipboard
Flipboard presents itself as “your social magazine”. Indeed, this tool allows building your own magazines by collecting links to content that you find interesting and relevant. You can use Flipboard to follow selected topics, create stories, and share them with your audience.
Max Benz from zeitschriften.io adds:
A magazine is a great way to share your interests with the world. Whether you’re passionate about fashion, food, or politics, there’s a magazine out there for you. But if you can’t find a magazine that covers your particular interest, why not create your own? Here are three tips to help you get started:
1. Find your niche. When it comes to magazines, niche is key. Think about what sets your magazine apart from the rest. What unique perspective can you offer readers? Figure out what makes your magazine special, and make that the focus of your content.
2. Keep it fresh. No one wants to read the same old thing week after week. So make sure your magazine always has something new to offer. Whether it’s breaking news, expert insights, or simply a new take on a familiar topic, keep your readers coming back for more with fresh content.
3. Connect with your audience. A great magazine is all about creating a connection with its readers. Whether you’re writing about the latest trends or offering advice on a particular subject, make sure your content speaks to your audience’s needs and interests. If you can do that, you’ll have no trouble keeping them coming back for more.
Content curation don’ts
I hope the strategies and tools described above will help you build an effective content curation strategy. However, whatever way you choose, there are certain taboos:
- Insufficient appropriation. Copyright infringement claims are not fun to deal with.
- Unverified information. No matter how “hot” the news seems to be, if it cannot be verified by a reputed source, don’t share it.
- Conflicting styles. Your corporate style must be significant and recognizable. Therefore, the content you choose for curation must fit that style and not annoy users accustomed to your way of presenting the information.
- Redirection to competitors. Your competitors create content, too, which may be great. However, think twice before sharing it. You want to attract users to your website, not drive them to your competitors.
Wrapping up
If you have not discovered content curation and its benefits yet, it’s time you tried it as an effective component of your content marketing strategy. Hope our collection of tips and tools will help you get started.
