Content curation is not just about accumulating links. It’s a lot more!
Most of the time, people confuse the term ‘content aggregation’ with ‘content curation’. Though these two terms belong to the content marketing industry, they are different in approach. Content curation can be defined as a content marketing technique that includes gathering the top quality content revolving around a specific niche manually and presenting it to the target audience in a well organized way. When you automate content curation, it becomes content aggregation. So, don’t get confused!
When applied as an online marketing tool, content curation can fetch a wide range of benefits. However, curating content is not going to be as easy as you may think. You can not become a content curator only by gathering links from across the web. It’s a lot more than that.
Given below are 8 tips that you can use to achieve success with this content marketing technique and become a content curation rockstar.
#1. Focus on a Niche Topic
Content curation, in its truest sense, is about educating the audience on an incredibly specific niche. If the compiled content includes a range of topics, you won’t be able to obtain success. If you truly want to strike a chord with the target audience, you must always gather best pieces of content around a specific niche topic that’s relevant to your industry.
#2. Know What the Audience Wants
Content curation works because it’s an excellent way of educating and informing an audience. But the curated content must be able to quick catch their interest. That’s why it’s vital to clearly understand the needs of your audience. Unless you know what can really make the audience curious, you can never expect to become a content curation rockstar.
#3. Curate Only the Best Content
One of the most important tips is to curate only best quality content. The kind of quality that your curated content delivers will reflect upon the reputation of your business or brand. While curating, ensure the source of the content has been re-examined. At the same time, the selected source must fit in with what your business or brand is all about.
#4. Create a Mix (of Original and Curated)
Though it’s always recommended to collect some of the best quality content from different sources of the web, going 100% curated may not always be a good idea. To become a successful content curator, you need to create a good mix of original and curated content.
#5. Be an Expert Resource
The main goal of curated content is to increase the level of engagement with the target audience. Effective content curation is about keep visitors coming back to your collections. And visitors will be compelled to come back over and over again only when they identify you as an expert resource.
#6. Do it Consistently
To get results from content curation, you must be consistent in your marketing efforts. It’s always advisable to plan the strategy in advance so that you can live up to the expectations of the target audience. If you fail to deliver on a consistent basis, it can do serious harm to your brand’s reputation. When you see your content curation strategy bearing fruit and getting busier, you can also plan to hire freelancers to help you with the task.
#7. Use Curation Tools
Thankfully, there are multiple tools that you can use to find relevant content for curation. SocialMention and Google Alerts are good to start with. AllTop (a good example of content curation too) is also a good resource to located relevant blogs and articles. RSS readers also do a great job for tracking content that’s relevant to your niche.
#8. Get Creative
The presentation of the curated content can make a huge difference. Just like a museum curator tries to identify how the selected items should be displayed, a content curator should think creatively about how the curated content should look to the audience for maximum impact. If you stick to the same style and pattern every time, your audience will be bored.
There are various ways to curate content. You can do it on your own blog. You can do it with your social media accounts. In fact, it can also happen in email marketing. No matter where you use the idea of content curation, adding value to your customers must always be the top priority.
What do your thin about content curation? If you have more tips, you should feel free to share them in comments.
This post was written by...
Obaidul Haque – who has written 246 posts on Hello Bloggerz.
Obaidul is a professional SEO, freelance writer, guest blogger and online marketer. Owner of HelloBloggerz.com, he works with a wide range of clients from all across the globe and helps them expand the online reach of their businesses. Music is like oxygen to him. He can be reached via Google+ or Twitter.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
There are a lot of tools out there to help with content curation. If you use a WordPress blog, you should check out MyCurator at http://www.target-info.com/mycurator/. MyCurator is a complete content curation platform with a unique AI feed reader that learns to find just the content you want. All of this within your familiar WordPress tools.
Thanks for sharing this tool, Mark. I’ll definitely check it out.
I like the look of MyCurator. Thanks, Mark.
Another curation tool for video specifically is Tagmotion.
You can index any number of Youtube videos. And even segments within them.
The tags are arranged hierarchically, like in Windows Explorer or Mac Finder.
So they can point to a large body of content.
Thanks for your visit, Andrew.
Content curation should be mixed with original content, according to Matt.
This is so good. It is important to know what the audience identified as valuable and then give them the content that is over and above their expectation. That shows that you truly care about giving them something of value allowing them to be more willing to forming a relationship with you and your brand.
Yes, you’re absolutely right, Craig.