Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

"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.

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....

...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....

...Shuttlerock is a white label photo and content sharing platform embedded on your website. It allows you to generate, curate and publish photos and stories. It means that your website is no longer one dimensional; it’s now multi-dimensional using customers, staff and partners and their social channels to bring your site to life.

What are the key benefits? The platform was born out of the frustration of creating content and engagement at scale. Here are the key benefits that highlight how it it will assist you with the marketing of your business on a social web that craves fresh unique content.

- More high quality engagement leading to more sales. This is created by the generation of ‘real’ content from ‘real’ people. This “is” content marketing.

- Better interaction with customers AND their friends: a social platform on “your” website. And more control of the customer relationship, content and conversations.

- Creates an on-going source of fresh content which you can share to your company’s social channels.

- Higher search engine rankings. Search engines require fresh content and they rate the social conversations that Shuttlerock encourages.

- Helps you build a valuable email list of your customers and their friends....