There is a lot of online content out there, making it difficult to narrow down what to read, listen to, or learn next. It’s near impossible sometimes. Curated content helps you to understand the constant stream of information.
According to Shaw Academy, curation of content helps to become a trusted referrer of valuable information. Curation helps us to extract the best content. Finding, organising and sharing online content have become conventional and well-practised by mainstream marketers.
Hence, if you’ve wanted to make curated content part of your content marketing strategy, then this blog post will offer you a great guide.
What is Curated Content?
Creating curated content, which you share with your audience, involves sourcing content from others. If you think your audience will appreciate and enjoy something other than an article from a company in your field, or expert advice from a thought leader, this is a powerful approach.
As a curator, you are responsible for choosing only the most relevant content to share with your followers, much like a museum curator chooses the most important objects to display.
It’s not difficult to define curated content. A retweet actually makes up a very basic form of content curation. However, you’ll need to bring your game up to maximize your content curation efforts.
Why is Content Curation Important?
Content curation is vital in helping to build a great content structure. Some of the reasons it plays a key role include:
1. Fill gaps in your content calendar
Your content marketing strategy should include posting content to more than one social network each week.
A large portion of this content will probably be created in-house. Curated content is a great solution for social media content gaps. Maintaining a regular posting schedule by sharing others’ content is a low-budget strategy.
2. Provide value to your followers
There’s a reason why everyone follows you. Your field of expertise is important to them. You’re trying to improve your own life or skills by teaching them something.
Nevertheless, not all the wisdom you share must originate from you. There are other authorities in your field than you, and you shouldn’t assume that you are the only one.
Your followers gain additional value by accessing multiple perspectives when you carefully pick the content you share with them.
Keeping your followers as customers can’t only be a transaction. You must provide value. You can create curated content so that people learn and feel educated about your business rather than just build your list and make sales.
3. Establish yourself as a thought leader
Sharing other people’s content can help you establish yourself as a thought leader, but how do you do that? Straightforward. You’ll increase your followers’ trust by sharing only the best content out there, so they’ll know they’re getting something valuable when they discover a resource on your feed.
In addition to sharing curated content, you can (and should) also add your own insight.
It’s always important to state your opinion clearly. Even just a few sentences at the beginning can make a vast difference. Additionally, incorporating a unique perspective will help you build your reputation as someone who understands the issues in your field.
4. Build your network
You can get on other people’s radar by sharing their content, especially if the traffic you send them goes up.
Be sure to tell someone you appreciate their content if you find it valuable. Be sure to mention their content when you share it with your followers. Nevertheless, do not expect anything back.
Rather than telling them what you enjoyed most, mention that you will follow their work in the future. You will be able to build organic relationships with other industry leaders through this.
You will gain far more value from these relationships than from a transactional link trade with someone who feels obligated to reciprocate.
What’s the Right Process For Content Curation?
Before you share a piece of content with your audience, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who should I share this with?
- Why would this help them?
- Is this a trustworthy source?
- Is this unique and worthy of sharing?
However, while you’re asking these questions, you should:
Understand Your Audience
An effective content marketing strategy begins with audience research. Content curation begins with this step. You must know who you’re targeting before you share valuable content.
It is important to create audience personas to determine what your audience wants. Your audience will be more aware of their needs and interests when you continue to think of them as actual people.
Rather than sharing content, curate it. As the curator, it’s your responsibility to share only the most valuable content. Select carefully. Understand your audience’s needs.
Please make sure you are clear about how to help them before you share content.
After that, you should be attentive. You should monitor how many people engage with the curated posts. By creating engaging content for your followers, you’ll learn what works.
Include Your Perspective
You’re followed because you’re interesting. Sharing without a comment isn’t very helpful to your followers when you are just retweeting or sharing. Your response to the resource you shared is important to them.
Explicit explanations aren’t necessary. It would be excellent if you could explain why you believe the content to be valuable in a few short sentences. Adding your own unique perspective would be ideal.
Link and Tag Original Source
Sharing content is at the heart of content curation. It’s not theft. There is no such thing as content scraping in content curation. The work is not plagiarized. The two things you listed are both wrong. In the best-case scenario, they are unprofessional, in the worst-case scenario, they are illegal.
Please cite the source of any content you share and tag the social media accounts of the original authors.
Use brief excerpts and links to the source to share content from others on your blog, as Pocket does in this selection of great dinosaur stories.
Our previous paragraph discussed how content curation can grow a network, but only if you treat content creators with respect.
Verify Content Accuracy Before Sharing
Online information can’t be trusted. Make sure you understand the content before sharing it with your audience. Make sure it’s accurate. Don’t forget to choose a credible source for the account you’re highlighting.
Use Proper Scheduling Tools
It is okay to schedule curated content posts in advance unless breaking news is being shared. As a result, one can keep up a regular posting schedule, without having to be present at their desk 24 hours a day.
Using tools like Hootlet, you can easily create a curated content post right in your browser with just a few clicks as you come across valuable content on the web.
Now that we’ve established that, let’s explore some more content curation tools that can be used to gather, organize, and schedule content for sharing.
Best Content Curation Tools
There are a lot of content curation tools you can use to ensure you execute this process easily. These tools include:
1. Pocket
You can save content from the web while surfing using Pocket. Your pocket account allows you to add interesting articles, videos, blog posts, etc. whenever you come across them.
You can add and access content from multiple devices, including your computer and smartphone. All saved content can be accessed from any device.
Having a collection of curated content all ready to share, and anywhere, is then a significant advantage when it comes time to create some posts.
2. Instapaper
You can also save web content to Instagram by using the app. Besides highlighting and commenting on the text you save within articles, this program offers additional benefits.
This is a very useful feature. Whenever you save an article, you will never forget and about why you saved it. If you have just read something, it is easier to remember its most striking feature.
It can make creating your curated post much easier if you make some notes when you save the content.
3. Google Alerts
Some people prefer to let content find them rather than seek or find it while surfing the Web.
Make sure Google Alerts are set up for relevant keywords. Your email address will be notified whenever Google discovers new content on the web with those keywords.
In addition, you can set up a filter on incoming emails so the alert notifications land in a folder and not your inbox. Now that you have access to curated content, you can easily create curated content posts whenever you want.
4. BuzzSumo
By using keywords relevant to your industry, BuzzSumo helps you find the most popular content. To make sure you’re sharing content with lasting value instead of just jumping on the latest trend, you can also specifically look for content that gets the highest engagement over time.
You can also find influential people in your industry using BuzzSumo and find out what their latest content may be valuable to you.
5. Twitter Lists
Followers on Twitter have a wide variety of reasons for doing so. If you scroll through your Twitter feed, you may discover content worthy of sharing with your followers. You can, however, use Twitter Lists to find valuable content to share.
Whenever you are in search of content to curate, you can check out the people you have on your list who post valuable content. If needed, you may also create multiple lists to accommodate different types of content.
6. Hootsuite
If you’re a content curation tool fan, Hootsuite probably won’t shock you. You can schedule your curated content posts in Hootsuite to fill in gaps in your content calendar by using the Hootsuite dashboard.
With Hootsuite, you can find relevant content by creating streams. When you want to create a curated content post, you’ll have a list of automatically updated content to choose from.
You can also include RSS feeds in your Hootsuite dashboard by adding the Hootsuite RSS Syndicator. Syndicators provide tracking features, allowing you to mark content as favourites, assign articles to team members, and track what you share.
Use Hootsuite Planner to find the best time to post your content once you’ve found some content you want to share.
7. TalkWalker
TalkWalker is a tool for social listening. A similar alert system to Google Alerts, TalkWalker notifies you of new content on the web-based on keyword preferences.
Additional benefits are offered by TalkWalker Alerts. As a first point, TalkWalker also provides results on social networks, whereas Google does not.
The second feature of TalkWalker is that you can filter content by type. By setting your filter, you can, for example, only send alerts when new blog posts are published. If you do this, your alert will provide the content you are likely to share the most.
You can also use Hootsuite’s dashboard in place of TalkWalker to receive alerts from TalkWalker.
8. UpContent
By crawling the internet, UpContent automatically finds content that appeals to your target audience. Content can then be filtered based on factors like influence and shareability.
UpContent also allows you to add notes on content for sharing, making it a good solution for curating content with a team.
9. Trendspottr
The Trendspottr content discovery tool helps you to get in touch with your audience about trending topics. Using real-time intelligence, it predicts trends, allowing you to share content ahead of the crowd.
10. ContentGems
ContentGems is an app that helps users curate content. Content is created for you to pick from when you are ready to create a curated post.
The content you see in your stream can be customized using advanced searches and your preferred social signals.
Conclusion
Content is always being created, so curating never ends. You only need to ensure to use the right curation tools and ensure your curated content remains perfectly done.
