Content Curation: Just Do It
Regardless of how mature your content strategy is, relevant third-party content should be a part of it. Strategists include curation for one or more of the following reasons:
- Thought Leadership: Exposing your audience to the best thinking in your subject area—regardless of where it’s from—positions you as a neutral, objective expert in your field.
- Bandwidth: You or your team are short on key resources (time, money, people) which prevent your organization from creating enough timely, original, high quality content.
Those are two broad reasons to curate, but curating solves challenges and delivers benefits in many areas. Content strategy best practice is to balance roughly 65 percent original content with 35 percent curated and syndicated content.
Curation is a resourceful way to power content channels, but Jennee Rasavong of AtomicBlog suggests an important distinction:
“The key to content curation is knowing the difference between curation and aggregation. Essentially the biggest difference is that aggregation is automated, while curation is more like being the information gatekeeper.
When it comes to being the best “information gatekeeper” you can be, consider the following two practices.
Stay Fresh
Stand out by serving content that isn’t already trending. Continuously broaden the scope of where you curate content from. Use tools to pull together RSS feeds and don’t overwhelm yourself with an unmanageable queue of content. It’s fine if curated content isn’t directly related to your product or services—as long as it adds value to your audience.
Highlight Content in a New Way
Use your industry knowledge to build around someone else’s idea. Challenge a claim using your own data. Make their content your own; but do so ethically. There are well-established best practices for getting maximum value from curated content— follow them.
Read more curation insights from Rasavong below.
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