First off, what is “Content Curation” ?
In simple terms: it’s gathering info about your area of expertise, and organizing it so your audience can understand it, and then sharing that content with your people.
You see, while basic marketing principles have not changed for years, we hear new “buzz words” especially in the online marketing world. And sometimes these buzz words sound more complicated than they are.
Here is Wikipedia’s definition of “Content Curation”:
Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Services or people that implement content curation are called curators. Curation services can be used by businesses as well as end users. – Wikipedia
It’s a Great Way to Create Your Blog Posts
The word “curation” reminds us of a museum curator. A museum curator selects which pieces of art/artifacts should be displayed and organizes them in the gallery so that the visitors can really understand and enjoy them.
As a content curator, your job is to do the same with the information that other people create and share that with your audience.
Needless to say, this is a wonderful way to create a blog post! You are not creating your content from scratch this way, you are “curating” information around the internet that is helpful and useful to your market.
Why Content Curation is Hot
In this digital age, we are all loaded with information, which sometimes makes it difficult to find the information in a concise, organized manner.
Say, Google makes an announcement about changing their search engine algorithm (in a very geeky language). All of a sudden, we start seeing all sorts of information on that topic flying all over the web, often making it difficult for us to find a simple, clear, and basic explanation of what we need to know about it so that we can take necessary actions. This is where content curation comes into play.
A content curator would do research on the topic, go through many articles, identify good ones, organize them, and present them in a way that’s helpful to the audience (ex. visitors to his/her blog) while adding his/her point of view on the topic. As a result, the audience will not need to go through the content they don’t need while being able to consume the content in less time. Plus, that extra point of view added by the curator could work to establish him/her as an authority on the topic and engage people.
Here is a short 1 min video that explains what Content Curation is:
As you see, content curation can be a wonderful marketing tool especially if you like research!
To recap:
- Identify what information you want to curate
- Organize the information you want to curate
- Share with your community the information have curated
Your audience will appreciate that you have cut through the clutter of information, and shared with them only the best! That, in essence, is Content Curation. 🙂
Want to learn more?
For those of you who are interested in learning more about content curation, here are some articles that are helpful to get started:
- A Beginner’s Guide to Content Curation (HootSuite)
- 11 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs (HubSpot)
- The 3 Most Effective (And Overlooked) Content Curation Strategies (Content Marketing Institute)
See, I just did some content curation above. 🙂 Hope you’ll find the above list helpful.
