Imagine you’re driving to the grocery store one Saturday morning, you see a bright orange sign that reads, “Yard Sale” along the road, so you decide to stop and check it out. Once you get out and start walking around, you realize not only does this person have a lot of stuff, their stuff is thrown together all over their yard. Adult clothes are mixed in with baby toys, decorative pictures are laid out around kitchen dishes, etc. It’s a giant mess and extremely difficult to find anything that might interest you.
You leave frustrated and empty-handed. Once you finally make it to your local grocery store, you start walking up and down the aisles and breathe a sigh of relief because this is how shopping should be. Everything is organized and items are grouped categorically, making it easy to find what you need.
When content curation is done right, it’s just like walking through your orderly grocery store aisles.
Content curation is finding and selecting the most relevant and highest quality content that meets the needs of your target audience on a particular subject. The curation process involves gathering and organizing content, providing your unique insight to the content you select and sharing this information with your target audience.
So how does content curation help with your content strategy? And how does your business benefit from it?
Constantly providing great content is a challenge for most businesses and their marketing teams. Curating content supports your current content strategy. It allows you to publish content more consistently, as well as keep track of some of your favorite information sources. While it takes time and a keen eye to sift through tons of content and select the best pieces, this process is typically less time-consuming than brainstorming, creating, and editing your own content pieces.
Curated content is considered lower-effort content that you can send out more frequently, which is why it’s the foundation of the content marketing pyramid. Curated content includes Tweets or Facebook posts that link to informative, interesting content with your own insights added in before the link.
Content curation also helps you build a trustworthy relationship with your customers and become a thought leader in your industry. As you consistently share needed information, information that answers your audience’s problems, they start trusting you. When they trust you and your insights, they come to you, the thought leader, for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems.
Today, content marketers use a content mix that incorporates 25% curated content. The other two content parts are 65% created and 10% syndicated. So if you aren’t currently curating content, then you’re only doing 75% of what your competition is doing. And you should be doing more, not less, than your competitors.
First, let’s look at two companies that know how to curate content — and do a great job of it — Intel and Buzzfeed. Then,I’ll show you the tools you need to carry out your own content creation efforts.
Getting Curation Right – Intel and Buzzfeed
The Intel employees decided to create their own social content curation platform, Intel IQ. This platform collects trending technology news, has a content stream that gathers Tweets with the #IQ hashtag, shows breaking tech-related news, and features stories produced by Intel employees or from other sources. Intel IQ’s curated content can be viewed and shared by employees and anyone who visits the site.
Screenshot taken 11/10/2014 of www.iq.intel.com
Buzzfeed is an extremely well known site. Why? Because their creative (and hilarious) team of curators and editors constantly create and curate content with unique facts and opinions that their audience finds interesting and entertaining. Buzzfeed shares an endless amount of attention-grabbing content with their audience, who then share that content and return to the site for more.
Screenshot taken 11/10/2014 of www.buzzfeed.com
5 Great Content Curation Tools
In order for you to do content curation right, you need the right tools. Here’s a list of five tools and how each can help you with your content curation efforts.
Right Intel
Right Intel helps your business identify content that’s valuable to you and your audience and then add your own opinions to said content with their Intel It! function. You publish content and your added insights internally for your team members, but you also have the ability to publish it externally through stories, emails, social media, etc., which helps you create credibility and thought leadership with your audience.
Screenshot taken 11/10/2014 of www.rightintel.com
Curata
Curata is curation software for businesses. It allows content marketers to easily and consistently find, curate and share pertinent, high quality content to their target market on particular topics.
Screenshot taken 11/10/2014 of www.curata.com
Curata also analyzes your curation and overall content marketing efforts so you can make any necessary improvements with your content strategy.
Trapit
Trapit is a content discovery tool that you personalize based on your wants and needs. You set up “traps” based on what you’re looking for in terms of content collections, and you can set up as many as you want.
Screenshot taken 11/10/2014 of www.trapit.com
Trapit delivers relevant content your way based on your preferences — giving a thumbs up to content you like or thumbs down to content you don’t like and applying filters — from hundreds of thousands of various content sources. You add commentary to the useful content Trapit finds for you and then publish and share it to any online channel of your choosing.
Paper.li
Paper.li is a content curation instrument that delivers relevant content to your audience through an online newspaper, which many customize and send out as a weekly or monthly newsletter. You find and select content that’s applicable to your audience from anywhere on the web and then send it out hot off the presses to your readers.
Screenshot taken 11/10/2014 of www.paper.li
Paper.li helps you build relationships with your current customers and attract new visitors to your brand. It also listens across several sources to keep you up-to-date on your competitors.
Klout
You may be familiar with Klout Scores, but did you know that Klout also offers a curation feature? With this feature, Klout recommends content for you based on with whom you are connected.
Screenshot taken 11/10/2014 of www.klout.com
You can give your feedback on the relevance of the article with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and Klout’s algorithm with learn what content you like to share most. The benefit of using Klout’s curation feature is that it gives you insight into what content positively impacts your voice in your industry.
Content curation is crucial to your brand. Your audience is hungry for interesting, informative, problem-solving content every single day. During those times when you can’t create your own content, you can still provide useful information to your audience through curated content. Now, use these tools, get out, and get curating!
Featured Image: Lyza via Flickr
