When it comes to content marketing for your business, basically what you are trying to do is create content that you can use to engage with your target audience. But here’s the thing, did you know that it doesn’t always need to be your own content?......Yes that’s right, you can use other people’s content!
You can provide your target market with interesting, engaging content that has been produced by others and still reap the benefits of providing value to your audience. Content curation is a term I’m sure you have heard of, but what does it actually mean? Explained in simple terms, content curation means sourcing great content that relates to your niche/ industry and sharing it with your followers.
In order to add value to your curated content you should add your own personal touch to the posts that you share. So rather than just posting the headline to an article followed by a link, actually write a few of your own words followed by a link back to the article. Don’t be afraid to share your opinion on which ever piece of content you are sharing, your audience will be interested to know your thoughts and it will also encourage them to share their own thoughts and opinions, which is great as this will increase your engagement rates.
So to summarise content curation is basically looking at the content that’s available within your industry and then pointing out the best content to your followers and adding value by commenting on it in some way.
1. Make sure you aren’t just sharing everything and anything without adding any value. Ensure you add commentary of your own and don’t just keep sharing things without any explanation.
2. Think about how you are providing value through your content and be certain that you are finding curated content that your target audience will actually find useful or interesting.
3. Don’t solely rely on curated content, use it to make your life easier but still produce your own content to go along side your curated content, as the search engines will always favour fresh original content. Producing your own content alongside your curated content will help you to increase your online rankings.
4. A really easy way to curate content is to use your Twitter account. If you see a tweet that you think your target audience will like, use the quote tweet button so you can write your own commentary and retweet the information. This is a really quick and easy way of curating content. The other bonus to using this method of content curation is that it will help you to increase your Twitter following and engagement rates, because more often than not, anyone that you retweet will thank you for the retweet and will often start to follow you.
5. Take advantage of content curation tools such as feedly that allow you to bring together all of the best resources in your industry, and keep you up to date on which ever topics you require. You can sign up for feedly here – https://feedly.com/i/welcome
If you own a business and struggle to keep up with content creation, content curation could be a great option for you! It will save you heaps of time and your followers will appreciate you bringing them order amongst all of the chaos, by discovering the best pieces of content and making sense of all the information that’s out there for them. Content curation offers you a quick and easy way of becoming a useful resource for people without producing your own content. Admittedly it’s not as strong as producing your own content, but it’s a lot better than constantly blasting out sales messages across all of your social media sites because you have run out of time to produce new content. A constant stream of sales messages will just put your followers off and will definitely not help you to increase your followers or engagement rates.
Using a scheduler for your content is a great idea, as it allows you to get your content done in one go, rather than it becoming a daily chore. HubSpot is a tool that will allow you to manage various social media accounts in one place, and schedule all of your posts in one go! You can use it alongside feedly, as you can take content from feedly and send the information through to HubSpot, and schedule your curated content ready to go out to your followers! The two together will make your content creation and scheduling so much easier! You can learn more about HubSpot and automated posting here - https://www.jdrgroup.co.uk/marketing-automation-agency