Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Content curation is all about mining the internet for material that can be shared on your social networks. It’s about finding great content and presenting it to your social media followers in a way that’s organized and meaningful.

The thing is, you’re probably not thinking strategically when you’re scrolling through your phone and posting from bed in the morning.
Content curation strategy is what makes the difference between mediocre and exceptional content curation in business.

Strategy is a must when it comes to content marketing, which includes content curation....

Content curation is a great idea, but it’s really quite tedious to have to do it manually. You have to go out and find content you’d be interested in curating. Then you have to copy the link and paste it into each of your social networks. You have to schedule the post for an appropriate time, and you have to add your own spin to it, and you have to make sure it generates the right kind of preview or website card. Repeat for every link you want to share, ad nauseum, and you’re getting the idea.

Thankfully, content curation is not a new idea, or a new industry. That means there are many businesses out there who have created products to help you. These content curation tools are designed specifically to curate content as smoothly as possible across your entire social media presence. Here are the best ones I recommend....

These are companies and publications that don’t just aggregate content – they add their own commentary and spin to what they curate. Every edition of their newsletter, every blog post, every social media share is chosen for a specific purpose and reviewed by a human before it is shared.

In other words, these sources curate their content like museum curators. They aim for quality rather than quantity. They rely on themes to group and organize their content. They often explain why something is important, or why they felt it was worthy of inclusion.

They are discerning collectors.These are definitely not the only great examples of content curation examples, but they are at least some of them. We hope you’ll add your own favorites to the comments section below....

...If you haven’t used content curation as part of your content marketing strategy, you could be missing out.  Content curation sites and pages frequently attract audiences because they fulfill a very real need to skip through the clutter and find valuable content.  People simply don’t have the time nor the patience to pore through pages of Google results, Twitter feeds, and Facebook messages in order to find the items that want.  Content curation offers up a considerably faster and potentially useful avenue for discovery.

When you curate content well, you can build up an audience of people who depend on your ability to point them towards the resources they need.  You become an authority figure, a trusted source.  And in the internet, that trust is invaluable....

Think of curated content the way you do a Works Cited section of a term paper. You use it to add relevance and to reinforce your argument. In marketing terms, that argument is that you are aware of the types of content that appeal to your audience.

Responsible selection of curated content shows that you understand your audience. And when people believe that you understand them, it goes a long way toward building trust.

A key difference, however, between content curation and a Works Cited section is that, quite often, the curated content comprises a significant slice of the content presented. In many cases, the content is presented with a short, original commentary.

How well does that work?

Well, look at the Huffington Post. They have practically elevated the concept of content curation to an art form. And they have discovered the fine balance between curation and branding. You’d barely know that they get a vast amount of their content from outside sources. It’s because they go to a tremendous effort to present the content in a way in which it practically becomes their own....

With some degree of irony, there's an over-abundance of information about content curation to sift through online - thankfully, we’ve been working to separate the wheat from the chaff. Kineo believes that as learners, we’ve got a lot of questions and we want to stay smart.

People are time poor but they want answers to their questions. So here are the answers to yours.

Let’s explore how we can tackle the content curation challenge, successfully tap into the vast amount of readily available content and filter it into our learning strategies....

I once spent a week speaking at three different conferences that focused on one of the favorite themes of events around the world: how to have great ideas.

Often it seems that there are only two things the world tells you about ideas: you should have more of them and they should be more creative.

We dedicate entire conferences to better ideas and read best-selling books to inspire more of them. Yet over time, the sad truth is that the only thing most of us do better than coming up with ideas is routinely squandering them, with bad or no execution.

Why do we fail to execute well on our best ideas so often? More importantly, what would it take to change that pattern?...

Many of us are curating content without even thinking about it.

We’re sharing that quirky New York Times article on Facebook. We’re quoting celebrity tweets and making funny (well, funny to us) quips on Twitter.

What is content curation?

Content curation is all about mining the internet for material that can be shared on your social networks. It’s about finding great content and presenting it to your social media followers in a way that’s organized and meaningful....

"Curation" is one of those words that's always conveyed coolness to me. Take, for example, the job of curating art for a gallery, or curating music for a soundtrack. Cool, right? Content curation is just as much fun -- and just as important.

For the uninitiated, content curation consists of finding material relevant to your audience from a variety of sources, and sharing it strategically through your communication channels. For example, writing a roundup blog post of great marketing examples would require you to curate strong samples of content relevant to what you're writing about. And while very cool, it can be tricky. There are many, many social networks, news feeds, emails, and infographics full of such content that can demand your time and attention.

That's why the responsibility of content curation is important. Think of it as being a successful wedding DJ: Your selections can't all be ad hoc and safe. After all, people can only hear Kool & The Gang's "Celebration" so many times before the floor clears, and that sort of playlist isn't personalized for your audience. But if you know your audience, you can accurately gauge the temperature of the room and have the confidence to give the people what they want.

The same goes for content curation. Instead of just rounding up the most generally popular things on the web, pick the ones that are going to be the most relevant and interesting to your audience, and provide the context around them that makes your site a destination. Of course, we never said that was easy. Where do you find this content, anyway, especially given the information overload we opened with? Good news: We're here to help you prioritize the resources by outlining some of our favorites below.