Content curation is about more than just sharing outside sources with your audience. Sharing new content establishes your company as a reliable source of information, especially when you’re not the only one adding value to the topic. Providing your insight and expanding on what other industry thought leaders are saying helps position you as an industry expert and resource.
“Carefully curated messages allow brands to learn about their customers at every interaction.” -Maria Coleman, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Litmus
What is Curated Content?
The process of curating content is the way you evaluate, select, and share quality content from other sources on your platforms. Curated content can include videos, statistics, quotes, links to blogs, or anything made by other creators and businesses. There are four methods that content curators use to select topics to share. You want the content you select to be valuable to not only you but also your audience.
1. Chronology
When you hear chronology, something along the lines of history probably comes to mind. That’s exactly what this strategy for curation entails. Businesses often present a curated timeline of events to trace the evolution of a specific trend. By understanding the evolution of said trend, you can harness its power more effectively.
2. Mashups
We’ve all seen some great brand mashups over the years. Most of us wouldn’t initially think of this as curated content, but collaborating with other businesses actually combines created and curated content. Mashups allow businesses to combine their audiences and develop a fresh perspective that increases the engagement of both audiences.
3. Distillation
Distillation is sifting through the piles upon piles of data and information out there. Your job is to find the best figures to share with your audience. When you're sharing insights, it’s important you are making the content more digestible for your audience. Simplify and condense the information into bite-size pieces.
4. Elevation
Adding your own insight adds value to a source. Developing new content by expanding on the thoughts of other creators is a great way to establish yourself as a reliable source. Whether it’s a stat, blog post, or quote, sharing your perspective will help you be seen as a credible industry thought leader.
3 Benefits of Curated Content
Curated content should support any and all original content you create. Curating your content allows you to tie current topics back to your clients in a relevant way. However, curated content isn’t meant to be your entire content strategy. HootSuite recommends marketers share 60% curated content and 40% original content. Sharing outside sources should add to your strategy, not replace it. The goal of curated content is to add additional resources and conversation starters for your audience to dive into.
1. Wider Variety of Content
Your audience will get bored if every post you share is from you, about you, or repeats the same message or information. Using new sources of information provides them with new topics to engage with. It’s impossible to write about all of the important topics we come across, but you can leverage more content by curating, resharing, and distributing it.
2. Work Smarter, Not Harder
Content curation allows you to share high-quality content with your audience efficiently. Curated content saves you time and money - it’s just not realistic to research, draft, and distribute all the things. Instead of devoting your resources to creating original content, you can curate. With your extra time and fuller wallet, you can focus on creating your own top-tier content, and maybe other businesses will share your thoughts, exposing you to a new audience.
3. Build Relationships
By sourcing and sharing topics that are relevant to your audience, you get a more personal connection with them. Curated content helps to improve your customer’s experience. This means that their trust and loyalty will follow.
Avenues to Leverage for Content Curation in 2023
Advancements in technologies are changing the world in 2023. As the world becomes more digital, Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at a fast pace. This technology serves as a great tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes when used correctly. But with higher levels of automation comes the growing need for personalization. User-generated content is a great way to create an authentic experience for your audience in 2023. Leveraging a combination of AI tools and UGC will show your clients that you genuinely understand their needs.
AI in Content Curation
We all know that artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the world by storm, but what does this mean for content? AI makes evaluating trends more efficient because it can lump together and analyze large amounts of data. There are all sorts of automated content generators out there. By generating a list of sources based on your keyword searches they can help you identify curated content that would best align with your business. Some refer to this strategy as content aggregation. Your CRM database is a great place to look to see what content is doing well and focus on those topics. New AI generation tools could potentially be used to share curated content. After all, AI is just combining pieces from all over the internet. This doesn’t provide any insight from your perspective, so it lacks any sort of personal feel. Your curated content also needs to be authentic.
UGC for Content
UGC - user generated content - is on the rise. In the past year over 93% of consumers claimed to have been influenced by UGC in their buying decisions. User-generated content is exactly what it sounds like, the content generated by your audience that promotes your brand. UGC comes from influencer posts and your audience. When people love your brand, they’ll post about it. This being said, user generated content is technically a form of curated content as well.
Successful content marketing meets at the intersection between quality and quantity. It’s hard to come up with completely original content to support your daily content needs. Curated content provides a solution that helps to balance the two.
