Being strong in your content game means posting almost every day. After all, research reveals that content marketers who prioritize consistent content creation are 13 times more likely to see a positive return on investment.
However, with the amount of research, planning, ideation and time content creation demands, you cannot create an ideal piece of content daily.
Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just pick up good content and post it? It would be, but it will not help you achieve your goals either. Or so you may think!
Finding content from other sites and resharing it is a common content marketing strategy. But it’s not what you’re thinking.
The strategy is called content curation, which can bring great results if you understand correctly.
Let us take this article as an opportunity to explain content curation and how it’s not simply copying and resharing content but a lot beyond that.
This article will discuss content curation, its benefits and how you can use the strategy with the best tools.
What Is Curated Content?
Curated content means handpicking content from different sources and channels and publishing it on your channels.
However, that’s not it. It doesn’t mean simply copying content from other channels. When curating content, you need to search, review, understand, organize and deliver only that content to the audience that gives the most value to them.
It’s like you’re a curator in a museum, and you need to select the best artifacts to showcase in the museum out of a bunch of good stuff.
So, there’s a lot of thought and deliberation to be put into curated content than simply copying someone else’s work. Only after you’ve discovered what’s best and put it together can you call it a well-curated content piece worthy enough to be published on your channel.
Benefits of Curated Content
Content curation clearly saves you a lot of time, stress, and cost. But there’s more to it. Hereinbelow are discussed some of the major benefits of curated content.
Ideation, planning, outlining, writing – that’s one thing, and then there’s discovering a brilliant piece of content and sharing it on your channel.
What do you think takes less time? Well, you know the answer to it which makes content curation a much used marketing approach among content marketers because not only will they save a lot of time on content creation but they will save on resources and costs as well while staying 100% active on their social media channels.
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Build Relationship With Other Content Marketers
Networking is what works best in search engine optimization (SEO), content and digital marketing. You want to build as many relationships as you can and content curation will be the key to that.
When you share someone’s content on your channel, be sure to let them know the same and mention what made you want to share that content particularly.
That is all you’ve got to do though. Sometimes, when you share a content, you expect favors in return. That’s not how you build strong business relationships. Simply try and make a connection and move on. If it’s meant to be, you’ll build a business network and relationship. If not, well, there are more fish in the sea!
Content curation allows you to discover and share content that gives value to your audience. You come out as a brand that has industry knowledge and cares to share that knowledge with the audience. All of this matters for brand positioning.
When you share good content on your channels and that’s in addition to original content and even shows how it creates value for the audience, you come up as a strong brand which is necessary for business success.
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Adds Diversity On Your Channels
If you are oriented towards sharing only original content on your channels, your audience will not get any diversity and they may even get bored reading the articles in same tones and writing styles.
When you add curated content to your channels, you are adding content variations and diversity that keeps your audience hooked to your platforms and making them want to come back for more articles and content.
How To Effectively Curate Content
Content curation has many benefits and you definitely want to use that marketing strategy for your channels. However, do you really know how to curate content effectively?
While it seems simple, there is a lot to be kept in mind when curating content. Here are some important things to remember and follow to effectively curate content.
Forty-nine percent of the marketers are creating content that aligns with the buyer’s perception and intent which means that content marketing has become more audience-centric. This applies to content curation as well.
Before you can start curating content, you need to know your audience so that you’re sharing only relevant content and not off-topic content.
It so happens that you read a piece, really like it, but it’s in no manner related to your audience. Sharing such content will not bring any value to your channel or your audience and might even put them off your platform.
Whenever you are sharing something ask yourself if it’s even relevant and if so, what value it’s giving to the audience. Only when you have positive answers to these questions should you select a content piece for curation.
When it comes to sources, there’s two things you must always follow:
- Use good sources.
- Credit the sources that you’re using.
Of course, you may not want to promote your competitors, so you can very well avoid their sites for content curation. However, mentioning your sources when you have curated content published on your website is essential to prevent any accusations of theft or plagiarism. So, be sure to use the right sources and credit them duly.
When you’re sharing curated content, you’re sharing someone else’s thoughts. It helps to voice your opinions on those thoughts. Voicing your opinions will help you add more value to the post while making it stand out amidst the other posts as well. Moreover, you can add content that goes back and relates to your brand which somehow helps in personal brand promotion as you promote other brands too.
While you have curated the content, its whole purpose can fail if you don’t schedule it well. You’re obviously not going to post all curated content. You need to keep a proper mix between curated and created content and be sure that they are lined up well within your content calendar.
The most essential thing is to ensure that there are no gaps between postings and that you’re consistent enough and your contents, curated or otherwise will be ready at the time of posting.
How Much Content Should You Curate?
While curated content has multiple benefits for your website and social media channels, you need to use the strategy wisely for those benefits to stay in your favor.
If you keep using only curated content on your channels, your brand would look nothing more than a link sharing channel or a PBN website that only offers links to brands for SEO purposes.
So, how much content should you really curate?
Well, there’s no ideal set for that. However, it’s best that you keep the percentage of curated content on your website between 30-60%.
In any case, don’t go beyond 60% for curated content on your website. Additionally, focus on the quality of the content rather than quantity. You want to post from credible sources and the content that really adds value. So, be assured of the same.
Top 3 Tools To Help With Content Curation in 2023
Now that you know what curated content is and how you can effectively curate content, you as a marketer will also want to know the tools that make the task easier further.
Well, here are the top three tools in our opinion that can help with content curation in 2023.
Hootsuite is a complete digital marketing suite for a marketer and a great tool to accomplish all digital marketing tasks and strategies. When it comes to content curation, Hootsuite has an amazing feature called Streams for that.
Streams allow you to track keywords, topics and other specific pages and accounts to curate content from. The feature also has the option to directly share the content and even comment on the content which makes content curation easier further. There could be nothing easier and more straightforward than this for curating content at the best speed.
Content Gems is a simple, straightforward and free tool that allows you to track keywords and topics and find different accounts and content for content curation. You can even use this tool with other digital marketing tools to extend its functionalities and achieve the best for content curation.
The best part of the tool is its complete orientation towards content. The entire tool is full of content to read, discover, generate ideas, and curate content. With that interface, it will become super easy to quickly curate content and even create original content more often.
This sounds like an oldie, however it is still the best tool around to track content and keywords. You can set up alerts on this tool and when a new content matches your alert, it sends you a notification on your emails so that you can immediately look up the content and curate it at the earliest thereby not letting it get older.
It’s this spontaneity and ease of use of Google Alerts that make it such a great tool to use for content curation.
Are You Ready To Curate Content?
So, that’s all about curated content. While it sounds like copying content, we hope that this article helped you understand that curated content is a lot beyond that.
With proper and effective content curation, you can bring many benefits to your brand and it’s easy to do that, especially with so many content curation tools available on the market.
So, are you ready to curate content and leverage its benefits? Start it at the earliest and make the most benefits of curated content.