Content curation is the art of aggregating and refining the best pieces of information scattered across the web to deliver a concise, presentable and meaningful content to your target audience. It is done in order to save their time and to give them an overview of “what’s not to be missed” content. There are various tools that help in content curation. Before you curate your content, it is essential to identify your target audience.
The aim of your content curation needs to be clear with a sharp focus on a specific topic. Earning a tag of a content curator takes a lot of time as it needs consistent efforts to produce high-quality curated content. A content curator needs to be branded as a person and not a company as human factor gives leverage to your content, thereby, increasing its visibility.
Let us take a look at the various tactics of content curation:
1. Share your content on social media
Sharing content on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook automatically stimulates users to start a discussion on that. A little piece of quality information shared by you in your own words with a relevant link generates likes and comments on Facebook. Marking your posts with a hashtag in Twitter helps the users to trace content posted by you related to a particular topic.
Higher the quality of your content, higher the retweets you get. If your tweets contain a relevant link, the probability of retweets increases. The reason why your content gets a boost on social media is that the social media users are innately motivated to recommend and share the content with their friends.
2. Build upon 3rd party content
Internet is flooded with content. There are various niche websites that cater to intellectuals and experts on a particular subject. Apart from that, there are blog posts, social media content, newsletters, online magazines, online news articles and a lot more sources. Quality content is hidden across all these sources. It is very difficult for your followers to do this exercise of aggregating content by picking and choosing only what is important.
No wonder that is why they look up to you. With months of research for quality content, you know exactly what sources to look for. Pick up the best 3rd party content, merge it to form your own commentary and share it with your target audience. It is definitely going to impress them.
3. Ask experts to answer a question
This is one of the best initiatives you can take as you get to share “hot and raw” expert opinion with your audience. Create an interesting question that really needs a discussion or choose an interesting phrase that needs to be defined. Invite experts in the field to express their views on that question or define the phrase.
This will create a completely original content for your followers. Experts will feel elated to have been given an opportunity to share their views on the subject. This curation strategy reinforces your image as a curator, because unlike other strategies where the content holds the risk of becoming monotonous dominated by your individual expression, brings in top-class and varied 3rd party opinion.
4. Aggregation of curated lists with proper classification and commentary
There are many people who curate content for different purposes. Look for the content, which is already curated. Make a compilation of such curated lists. Curated list can be a mixture of social media links, blog post links, e-books, white papers, research papers and so on. Identify similar lists and classify them under different categories so that it is easier for the viewer to read what they like.
Add your own summary and opinion by annotating the curated lists wherever possible. Don’t make a long curated list as it de-motivates your viewers to go through it entirely. Instead, post the content in installments. This will give a comprehensive view to your audience and they will keep coming back to you.
5. Customer-generated content: Request your target audience to comment
People love to share their opinion online to gain popularity. Start a debate or invite suggestions from your customers and fans for deciding the best look for a bridal gown. You will be amazed to see the amount of content generated when you promise to post the best suggestions on your website.
Once you fulfill your promise, following the same strategy will be a lot easier for you in the long-run as people develop faith on you and they start giving even more serious suggestions. You can also lure them with the surprise gift from your store for the person with the best suggestion. Try to keep this a time-bound strategy.
6. Invite fans to contribute towards community-generated content
Many online review portals follow this strategy to get a real-time opinion from the users of product or service. Customers are free to express their dissatisfaction, criticism or appreciation for a service. It is a continuous process which evolves with time. The direction of the discussion changes depending upon the subsequent commentary.
This type of community-generated content curation needs some moderation to avoid objectionable and inciting content on the website. You can set the terms and conditions for commenting. You can also set parameters for reviewing a particular service or product. For instance, if it’s a mobile phone review site, you can classify the reviews and comments on the basis of the model name.
7. Create a list of top 10 curated content
Review the curated content across the web and rank it from one to ten according to your understanding. The use of the phrase “Top 10 ‘your subject’” is a definite eyeball grabber. It, in itself, reflects that you have worked hard to rank the best content. Ask your fans to comment upon what they feel about the top 10 list. If their opinion differs, you can incorporate the differences in your next list to create a better list.
Similarly, depending upon the frequency of your posts or the topic you are focusing on, you can create top 10 list for the week or for the month.
8. Create highlights for your followers
This strategy works best when your idea is to keep your followers up-to-date with the latest happenings on the subject. Supposedly, if you are a sports curator, you will make a note on Tennis highlights or Baseball highlights. You can even give highlights for all the games collectively with the relevant links.
So, if your fans are ardent sports followers but are not able to keep a tab on the latest updates due to their busy schedule, you keep them happy by feeding them what they are desperately looking for. Furthermore, they won’t have to search for different sources when they are getting it all under one umbrella.
9. Create a photo gallery
It is a great idea to run a parallel platform of photo publishing besides posting textual content. From marketing perspective, the sole aim of the company is to keep the customers happy. A photo gallery on your website that shows your customers using your product will definitely bring a smile on their face.
Such a gallery testifies the satisfaction generated by customers by using your product. Request your customers to post their pictures for display on your website. Though this unique content curation strategy does not provide any information but it definitely increases your fan following. Like photos, you can also create a fan video to make the smile broader.
10. Create infographics
Creating infographics is an excellent way of sharing information that looks like a picture. Use art, graphs and drawing, in combination with the text highlights. A pictorial representation of information increases retention and it also gives you the ability to add humor.
But, creating infographic is a tedious process and you have to spend a lot of time to make it. It is not recommended for frequent posts. But, you can certainly use innovative graphic images that relate with your product and say something about your product. Discussion around such graphical images can be really interesting to generate a caption for your brand.
Conclusion
Content curation is more about consumer engagement than just reading. Use a mix and match of various strategies to keep your content alive. Many marketers confuse content curation with piecing together of information from different sources, which is not true. It is not limited to posting the posted. It definitely includes creation of new and original content.
