The quality of your content is one of the core reasons why your users are with you, and surely, you should keep on moving with top-notch pieces.
But what if your content plan suddenly gets stuck and you can’t come up with some fresh ideas? For this case, you can refer to one brilliant tactic – using curated content.
In this article, I’ll explain to you what content curation means and how to leverage your content marketing strategy with the curated content approach.
Here’s what we are going to find out:
- What is curated content?
- What are curated content benefits?
- How to curate content?
- What are some easy-to-follow curated content examples?
- What content curation tools to use in your strategy?
Let’s get into the topic right away!
What is Curated Content?
The curated content definition is quite simple.
In fact, it is content related to your niche created by others that you share with your target audience. You don’t take part in the content creation. You just find and distribute the already produced materials that can bring value to your users and clients.
However, the choice of content should never be random. Curated content implies a well-thought-out strategy, and when done right, it may give you the following benefits.
Curated Content Benefits
Sharing high-quality pieces of curated content can help you achieve these crucial tasks:
- Staying in touch with your audience when you do not have your own content to post. Creating branded material can be difficult and costly. You need to do a lot of research and put in other creative efforts to come up with fresh ideas for your content plan on a regular basis.
That’s where the occasional use of curated content can help you stay in touch with your users day after day.
- Building brand loyalty. Today users are pretty picky about the content they consume. In most cases, it doesn’t matter for them whether the material you share is curated content or your own material.
Value comes first in both cases, thus, curated content is one more way to add value.
- Staying up to date with industry trends and finding out expert opinions first. Content curation is a great way to always stay updated in the market and share news with your users in a timely manner as well.
This is also one more opportunity to engage them in a hot topic discussion and attract even more attention to your brand.
- Saving time. Content curation takes significantly less time than content creation. The only thing you have to do is to find relevant information using content curation tools and distribute it on your channels, making sure that you don’t violate any intellectual property rights.
How to Curate Content – 4 Essential Rules
It may seem that the curated content definition is quite simple – you just need to repost, retweet, or share content created by somebody else.
However, there are four main rules you should always follow in your content curation strategy:
1. Stay relevant to your users. Before choosing a piece of сurated content to share, define your primary goals.
Why do your users need to see it? Can this material help them with their problem-solving? Can you provide them with competent advice on the topic you want to discuss? In a nutshell, is it really relevant to them?
2. Never forget to cite the source. Perhaps this point doesn’t need an extra explanation. You just need to cite the resource you are borrowing from. Otherwise, you may face copyright, content theft, and plagiarism issues. A short unnoticeable note or the © mark at the end of a post is enough.
3. Keep a wise balance. Curated content shouldn’t take up 90% of the materials you create for your blog and social media. It should amount to 10-20% of all publications.
Otherwise, your users may think that you have no personal opinion, as well as time and desire to create something on your own for them.
4. Experiment with different content curation techniques and analyze the results. There are a lot of tactics to distribute curated content. Analyze the user engagement metrics in your curated content publications to find the perfect content-users fit.
For example, using analytics, you may determine which content types, formats, and information your users like the most. Apply this discovery to the next curated content campaigns.
5 Content Curation Techniques and Real-Life Examples
So, let’s take a look at some of the possible ways to curate content and corresponding curated content examples.
1. Social media content resharing
If you feel that your business specifics do not allow you to create too many different visuals (e.g. a metallurgy company), it’s still not a reason to refuse promotion on such image-first platforms as Instagram. Yes, it’s still necessary to create your own photos and pictures, however, curated content can dilute your feed quite significantly.
See how San Disc does it. They borrow quality photos that resonate with their business and the potential needs of their target audience. In the end, they mentioned the author’s profile and it looks really nice.
2. Sharing relevant blog posts from other reputable sources
This is a fairly simple yet effective method to curate content. All you need to do is find blog posts that suit your content marketing strategy and might answer potential questions of your target audience.
Of course, these posts must be of the same or better quality level as your personal blog posts, otherwise, they will not be of any value.
For example, you can create an ‘Expert Opinion’ or ‘Trends and Discussion’ column on your website and share curated content there once a week. Here is how Spark Toro handles this task.
3. Retweeting
As for retweeting, everything is very clear from the technical point of view. You find a tweet that might be interesting to your subscribers and share the tweet with them. However, be thoughtful with every retweet intention and remember to be relevant.
Here’s an example of how to get relevant retweets. Hubspot is sharing the best places to work for parents as it realizes that 2020 has been difficult for workers with young children, especially during strict lockdown. Since Hubspot’s audience is represented by specialists in IT and digital marketing, these retweets are highly relevant to them.
4. Curated newsletter
This strategy is similar to resharing blog posts, but in the case of a curated newsletter, you create a collection of quality content and share it in one email. This way, your newsletter won’t be overly intrusive. Users will easily distinguish your main branded newsletter (for example, with your current product offers) from a curated newsletter, but still, receive a great value.
For example, an educational portal for web developers, SitePoint regularly gathers proven and expert pieces on web design and development across the web and creates curated newsletters around them.
5. User-generated content curation
There are no strict rules when it comes to user-generated content curation. You may use it as you want if your users don’t mind. For example, National Geographic created this awesome page from the photos created by their users exclusively.
You may share the photos of your users (with their permission) on your social media, reshow their videos on YouTube, and post their testimonials in Stories. By the way, Apple fills the majority of their Instagram profile with user-generated shots as a part of the #ShotoniPhone campaign.
3 Content Curation Tools to Get Started With
Below are ReVerb’s set of content curation tools. Try them!
Surely, this digital marketing tool doesn’t need a long introduction. In addition to basic video and influencer marketing features, Buzz Sumo also provides wide possibilities to select and distribute exceptional curated content.
While using Buzz Sumo, you may use the content research and discovery tools, find influencers to cite them, monitor real-time changes in what’s trending, and use simply-integrated APIs for your tasks automatization.
If you are already using this tool for your SEO tasks, then there is no point in looking elsewhere. You can use the Ahrefs’ built-in Content Explorer tool for content curation tasks. Its capabilities are truly impressive: search for content by domain rating, authors, traffic value, number of social shares, and much more.
Using it, you can select the relevant posts for curated content based on your goal and monitor user attitudes towards these pieces here and now.
It’s a highly interactive application that will keep you constantly informed about trends, news, and upcoming publications that are worth sharing with your users. Get use of Scoop’s strong data analysis capabilities, as well as segmentation and classification by topic, audience interest, and business type.
With this tool, you can easily curate content for your blog, social media, and newsletter.
Conclusion
So, we’ve figured out what curated content is and analyzed some easy-to-follow curated content examples. Now, it’s your turn to research and show your users something trendy, relevant, and specific.
We are still here to help you. Our marketing agency has hands-on experience in content curation for different projects so you may outsource this task to us and stay focused on your core business challenges.
