A Guide To Curated Content: Everything You Need To Know

If you know what constitutes curated content and how to create it using the finest methods and resources, content curation can be a fruitful strategy for your brand’s content marketing plans.

You must publish material frequently across all of your platforms and social media channels in order to have a successful content marketing plan.

You might, however, find it challenging to create unique stuff to post without running out of ideas.

Thankfully, there is a simpler method that doesn’t require you to create new content every day to fill your Facebook and LinkedIn feeds.

Many marketers utilize content curation to locate amusing, instructive, and inspirational content for their social channels rather than producing unique content themselves for each social media post.

What, however, is curated content? And how will it help your company?

In this article, we’ll look at some of the best practices for your content curation techniques as well as provide answers to those questions.

What exactly is curated content?

Curated content, to put it simply, is the process of choosing content from other sources to distribute on your channels.

Included in it is the procedure for looking for, locating, gathering, compiling, and presenting that content to your audiences.

You can gather additional information, such as blogs, infographics, and news stories, to distribute on your social media channels rather than producing your own unique content for each social media post.

You can save a ton of time and prevent overworking yourself or your team by gathering content from a range of various sources as opposed to producing new, original content every day.

When you curate content, you look for other trustworthy sites that publish on the subjects and interests of your audience and share posts.

It is your responsibility as a marketer to identify the best material available and share it with your audience, much like a museum curator would.

After all, you don’t want to distribute content that doesn’t align with the interests of your audience or postings from questionable sources.

Why Curate Your Content?

Many brand owners and marketers ponder the use of curating content when they can simply write their own. The selection of the materials and exhibits on display in a museum might be compared to content curation.

The museum curator chooses what the audience sees, even if the museum possesses far more items behind closed doors than it has room for. This affects how the audience perceives the material and may steer the discourse in one direction or another.

You may want to think about creating excellent content for your brand for a variety of reasons. As an illustration, content curation:

• Allows you to efficiently produce or publish fresh, or mainly new, material with significantly less work than creating entirely new pieces.
• Can also improve your search engine ranks using strategic keyword and linking techniques.
• Might increase brand recognition among your target market. If you choose the correct content to curate, your website’s users will start to view you as an authority in your field.

However, for noticeable results, you must use content curation carefully.

Related post: 15 Useful Tips For Creating Content

What Curated Content Offers

The advantages of curated content for your brand are numerous.

It helps you and your colleagues feel less stressed, as was already discussed. However, curating content has other advantages that you might not have considered.

The following are some of the main advantages of curated content.

1. Reduces time

You will save the time it normally takes to write an original post for your social media channels by using curated material, even though it still takes time to find, approve, and post it appropriately.

While creating original content typically requires the time of writers or designers, content curation may be completed in a matter of clicks.

Even if you edit curated posts to include your own comments, alter the image, or change the layout, it still takes less time than editing an original post from your company.

2. Establishes Your Brand as an Authority

As a digital marketer, you want social media to expand the reputation and reach of your company.

You want people to turn to your profiles for information rather than other sources since you are so well-regarded.

Curation of content makes this possible.

Your audience will understand that you can assist them in finding content that matches their interests when you share pertinent, useful, and informative stuff from other sources, regardless of whether you produced it or not.

3. Encourages Links

Additionally, using curated material might improve the linking structure of your posts.

When readers are accustomed to seeing and clicking on links in your postings, they are more likely to do the same for both your original material and your content that has been carefully curated.

When other companies realize that linking is growing more popular in your sector, you can set an example by sharing your information on your pages.

4. Establishes Contact and Interaction with Other Brands

Speaking of competing businesses, content curation is a fantastic method to engage other professionals in your field in dialogue.

By doing so, you can increase the number of your own followers and establish vital connections with other brands that will be beneficial to you in the future.

Being open and willing to interact with other brands always makes sense because doing so enhances and advances the online reputation of your own brand.

5. Provides customers with a better experience

The goal of social media is to reach your target audience and assist in converting followers into devoted consumers.

Their perception of your brand improves when you can give them a wonderful social media experience.

Through the provision of excellent material from a single source, content curation helps your customers save time.

You may deliver that information straight to your audience, saving them the time and effort of having to search the internet or do their own independent research.

As more clients grow to rely on you as their primary source of information for subjects pertaining to your sector, it benefits your brand as well.

6. Eschews excessive self-promotion

Have you ever entered a store and been greeted by salespeople before you had a chance to gather your thoughts?

Customers frequently get a similar vibe when using social media.

It may seem too self-promotional if all of the content you share on your social media channels is unique brand content with CTAs to “purchase now” or “learn more.”

While giving value in the form of carefully curated postings to your followers, you want to quietly promote your brand.

Further Reading: 21 Easy Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

When Should You Curate More Content?

Now that you know what curated content is, you need to consider how much of it you want to use into your content marketing strategies.

You want to have a good quantity of curated information in your social media feeds to help position your company as a thought leader and reap the various advantages of curated content, but you also don’t want to be reduced to nothing more than a link-sharing machine.

Although there isn’t a definite consensus on how much curated content should be posted, a reasonable rule of thumb is to aim to have curated content make up around 30% to 60% of your overall social media content, leaving the remaining time on your content calendar for your own original posts.

Then, to help you avoid creating fresh content every day, you can start repurposing your older material and resharing previously published items.

Keeping your content curation efforts concentrated on post quality rather than quantity is another smart move.

Less frequently posting on social media is always preferable to posting subpar information or links.

Verify the source of curated material thoroughly and make sure it represents only a portion, not the main focus, of your content marketing strategy.

5 Ways To Professionally Curate Content & Maintain Your Blog’s Freshness

Let’s face it: producing fresh, high-quality material on a consistent basis for readers is difficult for many bloggers, brand managers, and small business owners. But if you don’t want your website to fall in Google’s search engine rankings or lose the interest of your target audience, you also need to continuously release new content.

What if there was an alternative approach to meeting content demands without always producing new content? It appears that there is—content curation. Here are 5 strategies for maintaining the freshness of your blog.

1. Make a list of your “current stuff” and update it frequently

The creation of a “list” or blog listicle of current issues, blog posts, or items you believe your readers will find interesting is one of the simplest ways to curate information on a daily basis. This list of “current stuff” can be updated frequently, like once a week or once a month.

Once again at the top of your content stream, you can move that blog post or list. Google is probably not going to penalize you as long as the majority of the information in that post remains fresh. Additionally, you get the ability to encourage visitors to return frequently to your website to see what fresh content recommendations you have in store.

You can create a list of “recent items” using blog entries from your own website, blog posts from collaborations, or news stories about your industry or niche. You are in charge!

2. Bootstrap New Articles That Draw on Prior Research

However, you can also effectively utilize content curation and use this technique to create articles that are somewhat unique. How?

You can use the research you’ve already done for previous articles to provide your target audience and customers fresh perspectives. There are two major techniques to bootstrap new content for posting on your blog or company website.

Utilizing Original Articles

You can start by using your own articles and the research they contain. Imagine you wrote an article about a significant discovery in your sector two weeks ago. This week, you can write another essay using many of the same reliable sources but concentrating on a different facet of the same subject.

Consider that you published an article about the best ways to interact with your clients as a veterinary clinic. You can use the same research findings from the previous article for the new one, but focus on the most effective strategies to reach out to existing clients rather than attracting new ones.

By doing this, you’ve created a fresh piece and given your blog authority in the market. However, you’ll also conduct less research and work on the new item for shorter periods of time than you would otherwise.

Using content from other sources

You can also use information and research from other websites, particularly those run by rivals in your field. Keep in mind that you must exercise caution when doing this. To begin with, each sentence you write must be entirely original if you don’t want to face plagiarism charges or face Google penalties.

That being said, it is not unethical nor illegal to reframe the ideas or insights from blogs and websites in your business in order to make them even better. Simply by outperforming other, comparable businesses at their own game, you may stay ahead of the competition.

3. Draft Multiple-Source, Bite-Sized Posts

The attention spans of modern audiences are increasing shorter, therefore it would be a good idea to capitalize on this and create bite-sized blog entries or articles rather than larger ones. Don’t forego credible sources and research, though, when making your claims.

Try to write relatively brief entries that contain a variety of sources. To concisely describe all the important details and make it simple for your audience to access your key sources, use bullet points.

By gathering a variety of pertinent research findings and data in this manner, you may curate material quickly and easily without having to spend a lot of time composing a lengthy blog post.

4. Streamline and summarize social threads

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram social threads are excellent for increasing interaction, but they may also be used for content curation.

Imagine that you and one of your customers had a wonderful Twitter interaction. Include a few screenshots of the Twitter thread and a brief summary of the discussion rather than writing a lengthy blog post about it.

The same ideas you discussed on Twitter can be conveyed to blog readers, who can then be directed to your social media platforms. In this approach, you can reduce the amount of time you need to spend producing original blog posts by using your social media interactions to promote your brand and act as a kind of content generation (or curation, in this case).

5. Create a “Highlights” Article with Links to More Comprehensive Articles.

Finally, if you have a sizable archive of previously published content that was successful, you can curate content from your own website. You may make a highlighted piece and link to all of that previous content within it rather than having to rewrite the articles, which takes a lot of effort even if you utilize the same sources.

For instance, you could introduce the subject to your audience at the beginning of your new synopsis. Then, link to a ton of earlier blog articles that are connected to the current blog topic. Give a brief overview of each entry so that readers will know which previous blogs to click on.

This is helpful for both curating fresh material and driving traffic to older blog entries that may not be doing anything for your site right now.

How to Curate Content Effectively

Let’s look at some of the best practices you need to use to successfully curate material and share it with your audiences now that you are aware of the advantages of curated content and how much of it you should post on your social media feeds.

1. Understand Your Market

You must be completely aware of your audience before you can even consider content curation.

For your consumer base, you should have buyer personas, but you might want to think about modifying those profiles for social media.

When curating content, you can then start to consider issues like:

• Is this content pertinent to my audience?
• Does this information offer any benefit to my audience?
• Will the information we provide our audience support our brand’s mission and values?
• What issue is being addressed by this article for my audience?

2. Acknowledge the sources of all credit

By definition, curated content is written by someone else.

When using their content, make sure those sources are appropriately acknowledged and identified.

While you don’t want to appear to be endorsing another brand above your own, you also don’t want to invite charges of copying or theft.

You can protect your brand from criticism by tagging your sources or using a @ sign.

Related reading: Duplicate Content – How To Find And Fix It

3. Keep your content on-topic

You’ll come across a lot of intriguing postings during the content curation process, especially as you get started, but they may be off-topic from your objectives.

Even though you want to share pieces that are intriguing and captivating, you also want to be instructive and useful.

A post might not be appropriate to share if it merely has a passing connection to the goods, services, or sector that your brand represents.

4. Include Your Own Thoughts and Captions

It is a good idea to periodically add original content to the post even if you don’t have to add your own captions or copy to every curated post you publish.

You may tie the post back to your business and keep it in the forefront of the audience’s minds by adding a line or two of your own ideas or citing a quote.

In the social media feed, it might also help the post stand out.

5. Pick Reliable Sources

Make sure the sources you utilize to curate content are dependable and trustworthy.

You don’t want your viewers to click on a link that leads them to an unreliable website, after all.

If you choose sites that provide false information or are associated with negative things, it can also harm the reputation of your own brand.

Always check the sources you utilize, and if the source isn’t one you’re familiar with, spend some time looking around other websites.

Related post: 23 Short Tips To Write Content

What Resources Can Aid with Content Curation?

Even though content curation is a crucial component of any content marketing plan, if done incorrectly, it can still take a lot of time.

Using a digital tool to assist with content curation can be more productive than manually searching the internet for pertinent subjects and postings.

Let’s look at some of the greatest tools to help you and your team with content curation.

1. Hootsuite

By monitoring certain accounts, subjects, or even keywords, Hootsuite assists brands in curating content.

The content curation process may be accelerated and made even more effective by using it to help you plan your social media posts and share information that you’ve curated directly to your social media platforms.

2. UpContent 

Curate by UpContent uses customisation tools to identify high-quality material that you can utilize for your social media platforms and make content sharing simpler.

To maintain consistency with your organization’s brand, this also includes updating URLs and adding your own unique images to postings.

3. Google Alerts 

One of the earliest and still top tools for keeping track of fresh content is Google Alerts.

You can keep track of new content and receive email notifications when it is released by setting up alerts for particular terms or phrases. You may use it to keep track of brand references as well.

4. TrendSpottr

There are two versions of TrendSpottr’s app: a free version and a premium paid version, so you can choose whether you want supplemental capabilities like pre-viral content searching and multiple language tracking.

Additionally, TrendSpottr allows you to view recent postings at the top of your results page, which speeds up the content curation process.

5. ContentGems

For individuals who don’t want many complicated capabilities for content curation, ContentGems is a fantastic easy application.

It is free to use and places less emphasis on complex search criteria and filters and more on the quality of the content itself.

Related reading: 10 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs

Conclusion 

For brands looking to find motivational and instructional content to post on their social media accounts, content curation can be a lifesaver.

There are several ways to successfully curate material and reap the benefits. For the best outcomes, try to combine each of these efforts. As you get proficient in these techniques, you’ll be able to churn out just as much content for your audience while saving a ton of time!

You may position your brand as more than a sales engine and instead position the business as an industry leader and trustworthy information source by fusing curated material with your own unique content.

Having a successful content marketing plan requires having a well-rounded understanding of what constitutes curated content.