Blending a mix of new content with the filtering and management of other useful information streams is a productive and manageable solution for providing prospective customers a steady stream of high quality and relevant content.
There are several good services that facilitate curation tasks and software can help, but on it’s own, software isn’t the answer.
Pure creation is demanding. Pure automation doesn’t engage. Curating content can provide the best of both. Here are several best practices to help you with curation sources, types of content and where to publish.
1. Sources of News to Curate
- Industry specific newsletters sent to you via email
- Links to content and media shared on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Reddit and other social sharing websites
- Google Alerts, Google News or Google+ Search
- Curation tools: Flipboard, Scoop.it, Storify.com
- Real-time search engines: Topsy, socialmention.com
- Niche topic blogs
- News aggregators: Alltop, popurls, Techmeme
- Bookmark and or subscribe to updates from industry news, magazine and blog websites
- Press Release Distribution Services like PRWeb, PRNewswire or Marketwired
- Review competitor websites and monitor for mentions of their brand terms in though Google Alerts and social media monitoring tools like Trackur to see what kind of curation tactics they’re using
- Suggested content from social media platforms like Buffer and HootSuite
2. Types of Content to Curate
- Useful resources relevant to your target audience: blogs, news, training, tips, networking and industry events.
- Content created by influential people of importance to the target audience
- Statistics, research and reports
- Compelling or provocative industry news
- Videos: YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler
- Slideshare presentations or search Google.com for .ppt file types
- Whitepapers, eBooks and case studies
- Infographics and other data visualizations
- Tips, How To’s and best practices
- Create short lists of tips according to keyword themes
- Compile large collections of resources according to topical theme
- Aggregate the best comments from other blogs or your own blog
- Run surveys, polls & contests that result in content
3. Where to Publish Curated Content
- Company blog posts
- As eBooks
- Email Newsletter
- Social Media Channels
- Contributed Articles or Blog Posts to Industry Sites
- Niche Microsite Dedicated to a Specific News Category
- Content Hosting Platforms Like SlideShare
These are just a few suggestions and the best ideas for content creation and curation will come from a specific analysis of your own customer groups and industry. The key is to do the homework of understanding what motivates your customers and to assemble a compelling mix of curated and original content to inspire them to engage and buy.
Be thoughtful about the usefulness of the content you assemble, create and promote. Empathize with your customers’ interests and goals so you can properly optimize content for both search engines and social media sharing.
Excerpt with permission from Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing, published by Wiley.
Photo: Shutterstock
Thanks for the great tips for content curation. Very much enjoyed the part practice #2 🙂 Here at mention.com we mainly set up alerts to industry related topics to acquire content
A few more further reading posts on these best practices that I have put together:
On point #1 on sources for content: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/12/sources-content-curation-inspiration/
On point #3: Here’s a framework on where to share content, and the pros and cons of each channel.
http://www.curata.com/blog/content-curation-guidelines-where-to-share/
Thanks for the detailed tips. Most often, we use Google Alerts and social media as our main source. But we also use klout and trove when looking for fresh blog posts and news.
Nice article! We think content curation helps publishers and writers alike. It reduces the content overload by taking from what exists and helps publishers out by enabling them to still serve audiences by delivering
relevant content.
Have you considered the best way to curate social media content? It’s another field in which there is a serious overload, and we are always looking for ways to make this easier on people, so please share your
thoughts.
Great tips. I have failed to use sources, such as Topsy to my advantage, but I won’t make that same mistake in the future. I have been using alerts and adding feeds to feedly to stay on top of the latest and greatest, but I definitely need to expand my horizons a bit.