Content curation is a marketing term that defines the act of sharing and publishing content that already exists, rather than creating new content.
Curation is a digital marketing tool that involves searching, sorting, and identifying the most relevant content. This activity, just like the creation of branded content, is part of a content marketing strategy. It’s mostly carried out on the web, whether on social media networks or blogs. Content curators are also known as curators.
Any type of content can be curated, whether it's a photo, a blog post, a video, a particular file, etc.
There are five types of content curation that bloggers, content creators, and marketers can incorporate into their strategies:
- Aggregation: this is the most popular type of content curation, enabling you to analyze different types of content, collect the most relevant and group them together in one place (for example, when monitoring social networks, you choose three images from an account that lists dozens).
- Distillation: this is a way of extracting the essential information and sharing only key points (for example, a summary of a blog article that covers several paragraphs in just a few points in the form of a list).
- Elevation: this adds value to content by raising the level of information.
- Mashup: this is the art of taking several pieces of information from external content (articles, studies, etc.) to create new content, but highlighting your own point of view. This allows you to add value to your own opinions by drawing on several sources.
- Chronology: this means approaching a theme in the light of a chronology or history, in order to provide an evolving explanation. This makes it possible to tackle complex subjects or those that require a complete history to understand.
You’ll find that content curation has many great advantages:
- It saves you time in feeding your various sources of information, from your blog to your social networks.
- It gives you the opportunity to position yourself as an expert in your field, thanks to the use of relevant data produced by other experts in your sector.
- It offers the opportunity to optimize your online presence, particularly in terms of SMO strategies for search engine optimization, by reusing high-quality, optimized texts.
- It creates communities and boosts brand engagement through the influence of original content authors.
For effective content curation, there are a number of software tools available that enable you to perform comprehensive monitoring of your areas of interest. Tools such as Pinterest, Google Alert, or RSS feed aggregators are good supports for becoming an excellent curator.
You'll then need to share your content with your audience effectively, via outbound marketing strategies for example, to maximize content visibility and boost positive word of mouth.
