Content curation is one of the most popular and influential strategies in the disciplines of social media and content marketing. But you don’t curate content on the side, you need sufficient time and expertise – and of course target group-oriented and appealing content.
Content curation doesn’t mean much to everyone at first. Yet many companies and web users already actively curate content. Namely, when they share other people’s content via social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or even XING and LinkedIn. But to be able to speak of real content curation, you need a plan and a holistic content marketing strategy in the background. Because mere sharing is not content curation.
But how does professional content curation work in practice? And why should you curate at all?
Content curation is a marketing model that is primarily based in the social media segment. The term is inspired by the work of curators who design and manage collections in exhibitions, museums or foundations. In online marketing, content from different authors is collected with similar care and … presented in a digital exhibition? In principle, yes.
Content curators collect content from various sources and prepare it for readers. But this does not mean simply sharing the link to an interesting blog article on LinkedIn. Instead, one would comment on the link, enrich it with one’s own experiences or insights and ideally create a link to one’s own blog posts. Another option is to collect posts from different sources in one blog article. For example, we as an agency could list contributions from various authors and SEO blogs on the latest Google Core update in one article, present different opinions and include our own experiences. We could also closely monitor the Twitter account of John Müller (Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google and godlike role model of all SEOs) and show and explain the development of Google’s evaluation criteria for content on the basis of a few tweets. The curated content can come in all kinds of formats, e.g. as texts, videos or graphics.
Producing high-quality content on a regular basis means a lot of work and is becoming increasingly difficult. On top of that, content that you create yourself may be interesting for readers, but it can rarely present a wide range of opinions from different experts. This is exactly what most people increasingly want: a multi-faceted overview of a topic instead of the possibly one-sided perspective of a single company.
And this is exactly where content curation comes in. Readers receive the opinions of various experts in just one article and do not have to search for several sources themselves. At the same time, the company can show its expertise and prove that it is constantly reading, also accepts other opinions and argues on a professional level. A classic win-win situation.
Not all curation is the same. There are different approaches to content curation and all have their justification. For one topic, distillation can make sense, and for another, you’d rather use the mashup. Neither of these mean anything to you? No problem, we’ve taken a closer look at the different forms of curation.
What was already true in school or university days is no different in online marketing: if you share or use content from third parties, you absolutely have to cite your sources. On the one hand, we don’t want to get into legal trouble – keyword copyright. On the other hand, we don’t want to make a name for ourselves with other people’s work and therefore clearly mark external content as such – honour to whom honour is due.
Brands and companies that want to optimise their content marketing strategy must first produce sufficient content. The curation of already created content is often a “convenient” and above all cost-effective way to make content marketing more efficient. However, the content must also be analysed and identified. This raises the question: Do you have sufficient internal capacity for well thought-out and targeted content curation?
Appropriate tools can (at least partially) relieve the curators. News aggregators such as Feedly, Poket or Scoop.it! do indeed provide some input for content curation. However, really meaningful peaks and insights can only be generated via monitoring, social listening and data analytics. So good content curation always requires a bit of hard work.
As a company, we want to communicate our expertise effectively to the outside world. This works great with content marketing in general and content curation in particular. With professionally curated content, we present ourselves as a versatile and serious company. In the best case, however, this requires appropriate tools, sufficient content and, how could it be otherwise, time and budget.
