You Don’t Have To Create It All Yourself

Who here has heard of content curation before? Most of us, right? But who is actively curating content as part of their social strategy? Ok, I see some hands going down. That’s usually how it goes when I speak with audiences about content curation.

Everyone knows they need content to get the word out about their business online. But there’s a difference between the content you put on your website that gets picked up by Google and the content that you use for social media.

On social, the content that’s most successful is geared for not only engagement, but interaction. The turnover, or churn, of content is much faster as your audience’s attention span gets shorter. Platforms are now gearing themselves towards quick bites of content like Instagram stories or Snapchat.

We have to be creating content on a daily basis. Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

Especially for small businesses, this can be a huge burden. You don’t have access to a large team or agency that can take care of this for you. How can you compete? The answer is content curation.

Content curation allows you to leverage other people’s content in service of your own brand and business. You can leverage other’s content for blog posts and email newsletters.

I do this all the time. I think of it as standing on the shoulders of giants and it works. Curated content is great because by its nature it’s not created by you therefore it doesn’t come off as self-promotional.

It helps to position you as a thought leader and a respected channel within your niche. Once you build that level of trust with your community it helps your own content perform even better too.

The first question I like to ask when planning curated content is “who is the target user? What makes them tick?” As well as what information would they be interested in that’s relevant to your business?

One of my clients is a B2B firm in Japan that wants to generate leads for events in the high tech and aerospace industries. For them, successful curated content may be reports about business deals in Japan, or stories of other companies finding success in the Japanese market.

For my own business, I’m writing a book about influencer marketing. In the meanwhile, I’m sharing lots of content from others about influencer marketing so the audience for the topic will follow me.

When it’s time to release my book they’ll know who I am, trust me as an authority, and be more likely to make a purchase.

Another client of mine had a medical product for mothers of three month old babies. For their curated content we shared a lot of medical advice for new moms. We shared articles about symptoms that they may not be fully aware of that could be serious. Anything medical related for that age group was a good fit for us.

As a marketer, you want to be A/B testing the content you’re sharing. I like to break my curated content into different categories and see which perform the best by social network.

Once you get comfortable with your content you want to see which type of content is doing the best at driving new followers, new shares, and generating the most clicks. This is how you can further optimize your decisions as you progress.

 

Action Steps

  1. Define your target users. Who are they and what information are they most interested in?
  2. Select several categories of interest and find content that is directly and indirectly related to your business.
  3. Measure which categories perform the best and which social networks each category performs well on.
  4. Optimize your curated content by looking at which category / network combinations drive the most engagement and clicks.

 

Result You Will Achieve

Curated content that drives engagement and builds your own authority.

Mentor: Neal Schaffer

CEO of PDCA Social. Neal brings a global perspective as an educator who is truly passionate about helping others raise literacy in marketing.

This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.