With the glut of competition out there doing everything they can to get as much engagement on their social media pages as possible, keeping your audience entranced with a never-ending flow of quality content has become a necessity.
Coming up with original content on a regular basis isn’t an easy task. Content creation requires money, time, and creativity. Even if you’re able to come up with a steady flow of original content, there’s no guarantee it will resonate with your audience. That’s why it’s vital that you learn how to curate content like an expert.
What Is Content Curation Marketing?
Content curation is the act of identifying, gathering, and presenting carefully researched content to your audience that revolves around a specific niche or subject matter. Content curation is not the same as content marketing, because you’re not necessarily creating the content yourself.
Instead, you’re gathering content from handpicked, relevant sources and delivering it to your audience in an organized manner. Familiar content curators include RSS and social media feeds.
Why Use Content Curation for Your Business?
Delivering curated content that’s relevant to your audience can benefit your business in a variety of ways. For one, you’ll position your company as an authority in your industry. Quality content curation means your customers don’t have to turn anywhere else for content in their niche — you should have all the answers to their questions carefully curated on your social media pages.
Another benefit is that it’s easier to curate content rather than create it. It takes time, energy, money and a constant flow of creativity to make new blog posts, YouTube videos, and Facebook posts for your brand.
There’s nothing wrong with creating and sharing your original content, but social media marketing takes less time when you share content that’s already been created.
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How to Curate Content for Your Business Marketing
The content curation process isn’t complicated, but you’ll want to do it right to avoid wasting time and energy. Consider this multi-step process on the best way to curate content:
1. Determine How Much Content to Curate
First, determine how much original content you intend on creating yourself vs. how much you plan to curate from outside sources. You’ll need to find the perfect ratio to keep your audience inundated with a nonstop flow of relevant content.
Keep in mind that each social media platform will require its own ratio. For example, Facebook, a slower paced platform, will need a separate ratio than Twitter, a faster-paced platform. There’s no magic number when it comes to finding the ratio of curated content vs. original content. As a rule of thumb, at least 25% of your content should be curated. However, this percentage will likely vary on a case by case basis.
2. Category Creation
Category creation is an essential step because it varies the type of content you’ll be sharing on your feed. To keep your engagement levels high, you should always have new content readily available. If you share the same material from the same categories for long periods, your customers will eventually become bored. Creating categories can remedy this problem.
There are a couple of ways you can go about creating categories to meet your social content curation goals. One option is to stick with content within your industry. For example, if you own a flower shop, you’ll likely only curate content that pertains to flowers.
You can also curate content that’s related to your industry. For example, let’s say you’re curating content for a computer hardware company. Computer hardware isn’t exactly exciting to look at, but posts about computer games that rely on computer hardware can be used instead. With this strategy, you can leverage the social media posts of a complementary industry to provide relevant content for your audience.
3. Find Sources
Once you’ve completed the above steps, you’ll need to learn where to find content for social media. Curating content from multiple sources will keep your feed energized and fresh.
Knowing how to find content for social media posts will require variety. It will also encourage you to build relationships with numerous content creators.
There are two primary ways you can find sources to curate content.
Manual Content Search
The first is to search for content manually. This process can be time-consuming, but if you enjoy reading/watching industry content in your free time, then it’s the perfect strategy.
Whenever you read a great article or watch a video that you know your audience will love, you can bookmark the page and come back to it later when you’re ready to share it on your feed.
Share from Your Feed
The second strategy, re-sharing other social media posts, is less time consuming and requires far less effort. With a few clicks, you can curate content in a matter of seconds.
How Is the Content Curation Process Different Between B2C and B2B?
The content curation strategy for B2C and B2B has several key differences. B2C marketing primarily focuses on driving consumers to make quick, impulsive purchases. On the other hand, B2B businesses tend to focus on content that engages stakeholders and builds brand equity.
B2C companies should focus on curating content that’s entertaining and easy to consume whereas B2B companies should curate content that’s informative and educational. Ultimately, running a successful content curation strategy comes down to understanding your audience.
Content Curation Tips
As a social media curator, learn the best way to curate content on a variety of social media platforms. Consider these content curation tips for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Facebook Content Curation
Facebook is the perfect content curation platform for B2C and B2B companies because it allows them to show the “human” side of their brand to their customer base. Facebook content curation should ultimately focus on improving your brand image.
Regarding frequency, Facebook curated content should be posted at least once a day. Facebook’s feed takes a slower pace than Twitter’s, so posting too many times in a single day will overwhelm your audience.
Twitter Content Curation
Twitter works well for both B2C and B2B companies. B2C businesses excel on this platform when they push out easy to read content and hold tweet chats and contests with their customers.
Consumers of B2B content come to Twitter on the hunt for informative industry specific articles and video links.
LinkedIn Content Curation
Without a shadow of a doubt, LinkedIn is geared towards B2B businesses due to its vast user base of professionals. Content marketing curation on LinkedIn is about more than just posting to your feed. You’ll also want to take advantage of LinkedIn’s unique features such as industry groups and showcase pages which allow you to segment the type of content you can curate for your audience.
Curating Content the Right Way
Ultimately, content marketing curation comes down to understanding your audience and using the right platforms. Social content curation keeps your company feeds fresh, your customers engaged, and it saves you time and energy.
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