Content Curation Basics

Aside from publishing original contents for your website, many content marketers are finding it more worthwhile to include content curation to enrich their content marketing strategies. Content curation is the process of discovering, filtering, organizing and sharing the most relevant contents from the web based on certain topics or categories. It has rapidly become a popular marketing staple for companies and individuals who want to establish a robust presence online.

We are in this era where there is a vast amount of information that people and organizations consume, so it makes sense to curate them to filter out all the noise and only distribute contents that adds value to your audience. Many readers turn to curated contents because it helps eliminate information overload and sort out top-quality contents that they are interested in. For companies and brands, content curation can further boost their thought leadership and become the top go-to source within their industry.

The Role of a Content Curator

Whether we realize it or not, everyone has been involved in content curation for years. Anyone who who has ever tried resharing posts (videos, photos, links to blogs and websites) on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have already done content curation themselves. However, it takes special skills and resources to be able to consistently sort and present high value contents surrounding specific topics. A perfect example is Guy Kawasaki, one of the top social media influencers who has mastered the art of content curation, boasting 6.1 million followers in Google+.

Develop a Winning Content Curation Strategy

Other than it being time intensive, the process of content curation is generally simple and anyone can do it successfully by following these tips:

1. Know your audience

Determine the type of crowd you are trying to market and contents that they will find genuinely meaningful and useful.

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2. Go to the right sources

Here are good sources of contents:

-Google Alerts

-Google News and Bing News

-Curation tools such as Scoop.it, Flipboard, Paper.li, Storify

-Content Aggregators: RSS, Reddit, Feedly

-Social bookmarking sites: Diigo, StumbleUpon

-Relevant hashtags in Twitter

-Competitor websites

-Niche-specific blogs, digital magazines and news sites

3. Types of contents that you can share

-Industry news, blogs and articles

-Case studies

-How-to guides and tips

-Contents from influential people within your niche

-Industry reports

-Whitepapers

-Slideshares

-eBooks

-Photos and graphics

-Videos (Youtube, Vimeo)

-Surveys and polls

4. Streamline the contents you share

Once you have an idea who your audience are, pick the topics where you will base your contents from. In our case, we choose contents on topics like web hosting, technology and social media.

5. Check for quality

Readers will judge you based on the types of contents you share so make sure you filter out the junk and supply only the best contents that they can reshare to others.

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6. Consistency is the key

Doing it consistently will give you mileage in terms of visibility and branding. If you intend to be a regular resource to your readers, always ensure that they can expect something from you on a regular basis.