9 juicy tips for upping your content curation game

Today’s businesses need online profiles, and having a simple website with your products, services and contact information just isn’t going to cut it in the modern world of marketing.

Content curation is one of the easiest, most cost-effective methods of attracting visitors to your site and generating interest in your company.

The trick, however, is doing it well.

What is Content Curation, Anyway?

Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and organizing it in a meaningful way.

You’re sharing relevant articles, news stories and editorials in a fresh way, and it allows your site to add interesting content faster and more efficiently.

Why Content Matters

Staying relevant and visible in any industry is a challenge, and it takes hard work and commitment to get (and keep) your name out there.

Regular content curation allows your current readers and followers to access the latest trends in the industry, and smart SEO tactics can help to increase new visitors to your company’s site.

How Can Content Curation Help Your Business?

Adding content to your social media accounts and websites is an excellent marketing strategy that can prove beneficial in a variety of ways, such as:

• Expanding your own knowledge of the industry
• Generating traffic to your site
• Customizing the user experience
• Keeping your site modern and relevant
• Giving your business an outlet to share ideas and platforms related to content
• Providing opportunities for increased customer interaction
• Allowing for free marketing and brand awareness
• Offering a more affordable option than original content creation

By incorporating content on your site and in your brand’s voice, you will see measurable results in traffic, hits and general industry interest.

Top Tips for Curating Content

Anyone can add content to their sites, but doing it efficiently is a bit more challenging. Following these tips will allow sourced content to serve your company more effectively:

1. Implement Reader Services

Several sourcing tools exist to help you search through daily content to find the articles that suit your target audience best.

Some of the most prominent of these include:

• Scoop.It
• iFlow.com
• Zite
• Feedly
• Curata

… although many people also curate content through major platforms such as Google Alerts, Pinterest and Twitter.

2. Be Discriminating in the Content You Share

In order to achieve the most success, you’ll want to be discriminating in the content you choose to post.

Too much content can appear cluttered and may confuse visitors to your site, while an abundance of topics may be too broad for potential customers and blur your company’s voice.

Identify who your target audience is and tailor the content you share to that specific audience for the best results.

For example, BareMinerals uses their Facebook account to share content of interest to anyone who uses makeup or is involved with the beauty industry – not just to its current customers.

3. Keep an Eye on Social Media

There’s a reason why hashtags matter. Not only can you use them to easily search content through social media platforms, but they truly allow you to get a feel for what topics are popular and trending.

If your site uses both curated and original content, this is an excellent way to generate ideas for those original posts.

If you’re curating articles on the topic instead, social media allows you to properly understand people’s reactions prior to writing your own introduction, and it can help you incorporate more relevant keywords, as well. Bonobos, a clothing company, makes great use of hashtags on its Instagram page.

4. Get Excited About Your Industry

Continually seeking fresh perspectives, industry trends and breaking news in your industry shows you’re passionate about what you do, and that inspires visitors and customers.

The more you know, the better, and that genuine interest in industry developments makes your business stand out even more.

5. Add a Personal Touch to Content

Simply regurgitating content is not very stimulating for readers, and doing so takes away a prime opportunity for you to build your brand’s message and voice.

Even if you don’t want to state a polarizing opinion, which is smart, you can still use an introduction that states both sides and asks the reader what he or she thinks.

6. Source Content from a Wide Variety of Sites

If you’re only sourcing your articles from one or two sites, readers will not only get bored, but your site will look lazy and uninspired. You want to show a broad spectrum of viewpoints, even those you disagree with.

Sometimes you especially want to share the ideas you disagree with in order to state your opinion or respond to the piece. Your visitors will enjoy the heated debate, and your site will gain hits from both perspectives.

7. Incorporate Search Engine Optimization Techniques to Limit Competition

This is where SEO knowledge truly comes in handy. Look at it this way: If you simply share the same piece with the same keywords and the same title, you’re competing against every other blog, website or social media account that did the same.

If you want to set yourself apart, you must re-word titles and incorporate keywords that will not only tailor the piece to your individual audience but will also increase your visibility in search engine results.

8. Allow for Easy Sharing

You want to encourage new and old readers alike to share your content, which in turn links back to your site and builds brand awareness.

Allow readers to “like” the content on Facebook, “pin” the article on Pinterest, and easily share the piece across any number of platforms to see the largest increases in traffic.

9. Make Content Interactive

People love to read comments — in fact, many people scroll straight to the discussion section for entertainment and camaraderie.

If you don’t have a place for readers to interact, post their opinions and share thoughts on the topic at hand, you’ll immediately lose a large number of potential visitors and the useful feedback they can provide.

Examples of Effective Content Curation

So how do you curate content on a blog without abjectly plagiarizing the original source? A great way to get started is by curating visual media – such as videos, images or infographics. Here’s an excellent example from the marketing masters themselves at HubSpot.

This blog post is simply a list of curated TED Talks relevant to the field of marketing. Videos are grouped according to subject and each video is prefaced by a brief summary of the video and what you can learn by watching it.

A blog post like this is a great way to get started with content curation – easy to execute and highly shareable.

You don’t have to be a marketing professional to successfully curate content. Here’s a great example from Morningside IP, a translation company that specializes in patents.

This tweet is the type of content you should be curating. It’s relevant to their niche – patents – but also of general interest outside of the industry.

Twitter is one of the best avenues when it comes to curating content. It’s so easy to share articles, images or videos and allows you access to a much wider audience.

You can build relationships and begin to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Try using hashtags and including images in your tweets for increased visibility.

Best Practices for Content Curation

Posting content from other sites and authors gives some businesses an uneasy feeling ethically due to fears of copyright infringement or plagiarism. Luckily, following some basic guidelines can put your mind at ease with what you choose to share.

1. Identify the content’s source, and link back to the original author when possible.
2. Publish only snippets of the piece that are most relevant to your audience.
3. Change the title of the article in order to incorporate your own keywords.
4. Source content from a wide variety of sites for increased credibility.
5. Always include a personalized introduction or response to the content you share.