Content curation: A critical element in any content strategy

Design Revolutions Now On Curagami
Finally decided to use @Scoop.it's easy to use embed tool. The tool makes it easy to add content curation to a blog. Simply copy the embed code and your Scoops appear inside your blog. 

Why would you want Scoops on a blog? Content curation has more reach and costs less than content creation. Content curation is or can become a big help to content creation.  

The "4th Estate" for Scoop.it is finding ways to bring the easy content curation Scoop.it creates with a company's content marketing. Scoop.it's easy to use embed (you embed the feed) bridges the 4th estate of content marketing. Well done! 

Content marketing lets you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. You can build your credibility and become a reliable source of information in your field of work. You generally do this by developing original content and sharing it with your audience. However, this puts a lot of pressure to churn out a large quantity of quality content in a limited time frame.

However, building your credibility as a thought leader and a dependable source of useful information doesn’t necessarily require you to constantly create original content. What will work just as well is identifying great content and sharing it with your audience. This will also help build your reputation as a business that really understands their niche.

Creating content for multiple platforms each and every day can be taxing for even the most skilled copywriter. It means coming up with fresh, interesting content constantly to provide great resources for your clients, but I know that we all can have a rough time at it if we go it alone and don’t do content curation.

So how do you exactly go about curating excellent content? Do you just use Google? What if Google does the unthinkable and fails when you are looking for content? Simple; you find content curation tools to help you widen your scope! I am going to look at the top content curation tools you can use to help benefit your content in 2015.

As a sales rep or sales manager, you know that finding relevant content is essential to enable your Social Selling process. Without it, your activity as a sales reps is limited to pitches and conversations with little to no value. Unfortunately, finding relevant content to share every day takes time, and when you do find it, it’s often difficult to get it organized. That’s where content curation comes in. These are a few concepts and tips to ensure that your content cupboard is never empty and that you stay available as a valuable resource to your buyers.

What exactly is content curation?

Twitter has become a very busy place. As we’re collectively following more and more people, our Twitter timelines become more and more crowded. The consequence: less organic reach, lower engagement.

Suzanne reminds us that curating content it important and valuable…when done correctly. Check out her tips for avoiding brand dilution and confusion.

Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content.

There are several good services that facilitate curation tasks and software can help, but on it’s own, software isn’t the answer.

Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Curating content can provide the best of both. Here are several best practices to help you with curation sources, types of content and where to publish.

Content Creation

Content creation refers to the content that is 100% unique to you. You write it and you own the copyright. This content can be of any medium; image, video, podcast or text.

To ensure time efficiency, clear messaging and brand consistency, you should only create content when you are sharing information that directly promotes your brand. This can be your promotional posts, quotes, humour and personal posts that represent who you are and what your brand represents.

These posts should add value and ultimately bring your audience one step closer to you.

Your own created content should make up roughly 20% of your overall content strategy. This ensures you are building brand awareness, promoting your products/services and keeping top of mind without being spammy or overly promotional.


Content Aggregation

Content aggregation refers to the content that you pull directly from sources. Often there are certain tools that are used to do this automatically.

When it comes to sharing it on social media, you share it directly as is. This could be the title of the article and a link. You may add a hashtag but there is no additional commentary.

This content as with all content that you don’t own should be attributed to the author.

While this content is really easy to source and share with your social media community, it should be limited to a small percentage of your overall content strategy.

If you rely on aggregated content too often, it will just add to the noise. Think about it, if everyone is simply sharing others content round and round, it’s just the same ‘stuff’ being seen over and over again. It’s not adding value, it’s wasting time, our most precious resource.

If you want your community to stay loyal to your business and brand, it’s so important that you provide a reason to visit and a reason to stay. This means bringing something unique that adds additional value that you can’t receive anywhere else.

This is where content curation comes in.

Content Curation

Content curation refers to the content that you bring to your audience but add additional commentary to. Curating content adds a unique perspective that makes it highly relevant, interesting and valuable to your community. This can be as simple as a comment on a link or identifying key point that readers should focus on.

While content aggregation is ok on occasion, your goal should really be to curate the content you source and choose to share.

80% of the content we share shouldn’t be directly promoting our business but it still needs to be bringing value. Plus, it can be really difficult trying to constantly come up with new content. Content curation solves this problem while helping you stand out above the noise.

Content curation saves you time, provides an opportunity to leverage your knowledge and it pays it forward for the high quality sources you choose to share with your audience.

There’s so much content being produced on the web right now that I’m truly having a difficult time finding articles of value – albeit through search, social or promotion. I am shocked at how shallow many of the content marketing strategies are on corporate sites. Some just had recent news and press releases about the company, others have an array of lists, others have feature releases about their products, and others only had heavy thought leadership content.

While much of the content is well-produced, it’s often uni-dimensional. In other words, the same messaging focused on the same type of visitor with the same medium… in every piece of content. In my opinion, there are multiple dimensions to a balanced content strategy.