Trend sponsors

Marketing

Media

Social Media

Youth

Strategy

Athar Naser's articles

BizTrends 2015 opinion

What is content curation?

By: Athar Naser | 8 Jan 2013 07:45

When thinking about the content involved in your content strategy, there are two possible routes to take - creation and curation. Creation is, of course, the act of generating your own content. Curation, on the other hand, is the act of 'collecting', or 'collating' content your audience will find useful. This means sorting through the masses of content on the web, finding the useful info so that your consumer doesn't have to, and organising it in a way that makes it easy to find.

Like a museum curator, a content curator picks a theme, provides context, decides what piece of content to place where, how content should be labelled or annotated and how it should be displayed.

Like most decisions you make as a content marketer, your decisions about curating content should be based on your target audience, your content strategy, and your unique voice. You're continually looking for the content that's most useful and relevant to your consumer and making it easily available to them.

Content that counts

You can find out what this is by doing a thorough content audit (something we covered in our second blog post) and making sure you're curating content that counts. Beware of the common error of curating to fill a schedule, however.... Read everything you curate and make sure it fits in with the rest of your content. Only share something when you have a reason to do so, and standardise your timing of new posts where you can. Curating for the sake of curating is the surest way to lose your audience.

Curating should be something you do on a daily basis, so that your audience knows that they can come to you first when they need to find information they might otherwise have had to spend valuable time searching for it on the web. It will help establish you as a thought leader in your field and capture attention in a cluttered web space. You can curate content over a website or your social media properties, which will also encourage sharing contributing towards growing your audience.

Curation can do a number of things for you as a content marketer:

Add authority to your web presence
Generate inbound links
Keep you up to date with industry trends
Help amplify the outreach of your created content by attracting a bigger audience

Three S's

Content curation can be divided into "The Three S's": "Seek", "Sense" and "Share".

Finding the information, or "seeking", is only one-third of the curating process. Making "sense" of the information, or contextualising it, say in a blog post, is just as important. "Sharing" it, by publishing the blog post or infographic you use to make sense of the information, is the final step in the curation process.

Look out for our next piece, where we discuss the content life cycle.

For more:

Bizcommunity: What is content marketing?, 9 November 2012
Bizcommunity: Content analysis explained, 11 November 2012
Bizcommunity: Difference between content marketing, SEO, 21 November 2012
Bizcommunity: Content marketing and social media, 26 November 2012


						BizLike	Bookmark	Email	Print

Athar Naser's articles

About Athar Naser

Athar Naser is head of Juice Content. He is responsible for content strategy and content marketing across the group as well as for department clients. He brings a wealth of global media and digital experience to the content specialist division of Prime Media Online, as well as to the already rich talent pool at the publisher of South African web portal, iafrica.com. Follow @JuiceContent on Twitter.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This Message Board accepts no liability of legal consequences that arise from the Message Boards (e.g. defamation, slander, or other such crimes). All posted messages are the sole property of their respective authors. The maintainer does retain the right to remove any message posts for whatever reasons. People that post messages to this forum are not to libel/slander nor in any other way depict a company, entity, individual(s), or service in a false light; should they do so, the legal consequences are theirs alone. Bizcommunity.com will disclose authors' IP addresses to authorities if compelled to do so by a court of law.