Understanding Content Curation In Digital Marketing
Content curation is the seeding of third party relevant content aligned with your business proposition that helps amplify your objectives but also increase efficiencies within your content mix.
Once you have identified the best publications from which to curate content, you can begin to learn more about your target audience and the kind of content they most engage with. Do this by experimenting with the different content formats and topics you curate; this is also a great way to ascertain where you should focus your efforts when creating content yourself.
Make sure to provide your own take on any content you curate by adding some additional insight, opinion or some context. In this way, even though you may not have created the content yourself, you’re still establishing yourself as a source of knowledge.
And don’t forget to be selective about what you curate. You’re trying to showcase your thought leadership, so pick high-quality content that reflects well on your personal brand and adds genuine value to your target audience.
Content curation and creation have various benefits and limitations. Creation is the unique generation of owned content. Curation is the usage of the third-party created content with added insight to further your positioning.
A good content strategy should have a mix of both types of content.
Curation:
- Using aligned 3rd party content: check your sources to make sure they’re truthful and reliable
- Addition of commentary: add your two cents and value or comment on the curated content
- Lower resource investment: it’s less time and money by leveraging existing content
- Limited ownership: you need to credit the original source
- Community input: Great potential to engage your community with their content
Creation:
- Original content: nowhere else on the web
- Higher resource investment: it takes more money and time to produce
- 100% ownership: you have full control of the content
- Credibility: as it’s original and controlled there’s greater credibility with online audiences.
The benefits of content curation include:
- Makes your company/brand appear less promotional
- Makes your audience like you more
- Generates overall goodwill across social channels
- Positions your company as an industry leader
There are a number of methods you can use to curate content:
#1 Content Websites as part of content curation in digital marketing
Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Storyful, Pinterest are vast libraries of content perfect for curation with accreditation. Make sure to specify your interest sets to tailor your content needs. Some of the content on these sites will carry a licensing cost though.
#2 RSS Feeds as part of content curation in digital marketing
Rich Site Summary is a format for delivering regularly changing web content straight to your inbox. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Subscribing to relevant RSS feeds can keep you up to date and relevant with content to curate.
- Email notifications: set up Google Alerts for specific topics and keywords to identify when new content is created in your industry.
#3 Social listening as part of content curation in digital marketing
You have to designate a search stream on platforms like Twitter to be listening for keywords or phrases to look for new relevant content.
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary and is a great way of having summarized content sent directly to your inbox negating the need to visit lots of websites a day to see what content people are talking about. Some great RSS feeds include:
- Feedly: a news aggregator available as an app for iOS and android, also available to use in native web application
- FeedSpot: allows users a composite view of content from their predetermined websites all in one place
- BlogLovin: specifically for blog content, review in one easy to use dashboard once you’ve specified which blogs to follow
Email alert tools for curation include:
- Google Alerts: users can set up search keywords or terms using this free service to identify content, articles or comment for content curation ideas across the web or from specified websites
- Kantar: provides media monitoring across online and the entire broadcast range behind paywalls. The service can be expensive, however, as the price is dictated by volume.
- Bing News Alerts: can be used to track key topics or phrases of interest by setting up Bing News alerts to highlight results within the platform’s news content
When choosing content curation tools, it’s worth considering if they are:
#1 Customizable
How much freedom do you have to use the content? Some content may be for editorial usage only and not used to promote or market a business. Other content may have more relaxed usage policy. The onus is on the content curator to check the usage policy and abide by it.
#2 Trust as part of content curation in digital marketing
How factually correct and accurate is the content you’re curating? As soon as you share it with your audiences you’ll be held accountable for the truthfulness of the content so always consider the credibility of third party content before sharing it.
#3 Cost
Some content carries a license fee for curation. Make sure it’s worth the investment before sharing. you must make sure that you have found out if you have to pay before you can make use of such contents. This will assist you in avoiding unnecessary legal tussles.
Best practice guidelines when it comes to content curation:
- Verify the publisher and content are factually correct and from a reliable source
- Check that it aligns to your business goals
- Be sure you can add insight and mix it with your original content
- Always credit the original content creator and link back to their original publication
- Don’t just duplicate content you’ve found elsewhere.
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