Content marketing – creating and sharing your own blog entries, videos, infographics and more to attract customer attention and drive sales – is a great strategy to promote your small business. However, great doesn’t mean easy.
Many small business owners have discovered that consistently creating, sharing and promoting original, high quality content is a difficult, time-consuming task. Things become more complicated when you realize that to be an effective content marketer, you don’t just need good content, you need a lot of good content.
What Is Content Curation?
That’s where content curation comes in. Content curation involves gathering, organizing and sharing online content that you think your customers will really appreciate. This content doesn’t have to be directly tied to your products or services, but instead speak to topics you know your customers are interested in.
For example, a wedding planner could collect all kinds of content about wedding dresses, fresh flower arrangements, cake design, etiquette and more. Even though the wedding planner doesn’t provide any of these services, they’re obviously topics of interest to their clients.
Today’s customers are perpetually hungry for information. You don’t have to do the work of creating this information yourself – but by providing organized access to it, you enjoy the benefit of having a reason for your customers to engage with your brand, often directly on your website.
Content Curation sites such as paper.li, Rebel Mouse, and Storify automate the content curation process to some extent. These sites make it easier to find content that will be interesting to your customers by searching websites and social media for the keywords and topics you indicate are most relevant. Some sites also offer the ability to include content recommended by other users.
Free or Low-Cost Content Curation Tools
Create a daily, weekly or monthly customizable newspaper delivered directly to your subscribers’ inbox. Easy to use newsroom allows you to automatically draw content from the sites and social media platforms more relevant to your customers. Make sure to take advantage of the editor’s note feature that allows you to speak directly to your readership.
Organize and display all of the content from your social media presence in one central, visually compelling location. If you’re like the typical small business owner, a significant amount of the content on your social media site is not material you created yourself, and is instead items you shared from other sources.
Rebel Mouse allows you to make the most of your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and LinkedIn content. RebelMouse can be embedded in your company’s website, adding a valuable element of dynamic content for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes. Strategic use of the Event functionality can help you maximize the return from any events your business attends, participates in or hosts.
Combine your own content with content you’ve found online or had recommended to you by other Scoop.it users on Topic Pages. Slightly more labor-intensive than Paper.li, Scoop.it allows business owners to send out a monthly newsletter at the free level; weekly newsletter functionality becomes available at the paid level.
Storify
Collect content from across the Web and publish what you’ve found on Storify’s platform, which can be embedded in your own website. Easily shared content is a great way to connect with your customers. At the paid level, Storify offers privacy settings which make it an ideal tool for internal communications regarding market research and other online inquiries.
Smart Digital Marketing: Clarity and Commitment Count
Content curation can be a valuable tool to add to your marketing mix. Before you move forward, however, take the time to think through what you’re going to accomplish with your content curation efforts.
It helps to think of a content curation platform as a custom newspaper or magazine that you’re creating for your customers. You want to be very clear about what type of content you want to feature. What topics are you going to discuss? What type of tone do you want your publication to have?
Creating parameters for the content you want to feature will make the selection process easier. It’s much better to be organized and systematic than it is to try to fly by the seat of your pants.
Commitment is the other consideration to take into account. Content curation platforms allow you to connect with your customers often – sometimes even daily. However, you need to objectively analyze whether that level of engagement is sustainable for your business. Just because content curation is less work than creating original content, it doesn’t mean it’s no work at all.
Focus on quality. It’s much better to create a good newsletter or magazine that’s updated weekly or even monthly than it is to put something of lesser quality out more frequently. Smart integration of content curation platforms into your digital marketing toolbox can make the process relatively easy – and even a little fun.
Content Curation Concept Photo via Shutterstock
Kim Rawks
Great collection, Jennifer! Will any of these count as duplicate content with Google, though? I’m getting more and more vigilant about ticking off the Google overlords. 🙂
Great question and I am no Matt Cutts – but he has some great videos on Google best practices. It is doable to curate content, but you do need to put in some added effort. MOZ also has a great post explaining each of the steps to leveraging content curation as related to SEO. The point I think is like anything else if done with thought and focus you can benefit from content curation.
I hope this helps!
Aira Bongco
Think about it as creating new content by quoting the right references. As long as you reference them the right way, then you’re still doing the right thing. In the end, it is all about creating content that is beneficial to your audience.
Kim,
To chime in, I believe that it won’t cause duplicate content issue, as long as you link to the original sources to give “vote” they deserve.
Hi, Jennifer. I appreciate your suggestions! Might I recommend Floost.it as well? It’s a pretty convenient curation site! We do make sure that we actively participate when it comes to content curation, but as you’ve said, we make sure our content shared has quality and must contribute something valuable to our readers and to ourselves too.
Ava – thanks for the recommendation I will check out your recommendation.
Google loves content and ranks any websites higher with fresh content. Using content curation tools for marketing is a nice solution to create buzz.
I would add feedly to the list. It has come into its own as a magazine-style RSS feed tool. I use it religiously every day and it fills in the gaps created by paid citation methods.
Regarding the issue of duplicate content, you need to annotate the content with your original take of the subject matter.
A few sentences from the original post, a new and catchy headline with a link back to the source and you are all set. The key is that people want to read what you have to say about the content you curate and do not use a lot of the original content.
Tangerine
Hey Jennifer, an informative article. Content does compel and attract consumers and retain them is a marvellous thing which Content Marketing does but creating and managing this Content is not an easy task. We at Tangerine Digital (www.tangerinedigital.com) have hands-on experience in creating Quality, Relevant and Engaging Content for varied Social Platforms.
Thank you so much
Team Tangerine Digital
Jennifer,
I am using all those tools, except Storify. If I should mention my favourite one, that would definitely be Paper.li. I can add feeds from RSS and social media and have the content from the sources of my choice get published automatically. I can also add any stories I stumble as I surf the web.
Jennifer,
Great introduction, and all of these are great tools to get started with curation. If you have a WordPress site, the MyCurator plugin allows you to easily curate content directly to your site. Its completely integrated into WordPress, and you can find it on the WordPress plugin repository.
We’ve been using Google Alert as our content curation tool but of these four websites (Paper.li, Rebel Mouse, Scoop.it and Storify) are much more complete and even will help you with the publishing of your content, not just the collecting of it.
Thanks for the post. These are all great steps to get started on content curation. Any tool that allows you to generate not just good content but a lot of it is something that every small business should look in to.
Nick Kellet
Check out List.ly as a unique way of curating and creating original content.
Here’s some curation resources on Listly
http://list.ly/search?q=curation
Johnny
Great collection of content curation tools.
There is newly started Storify alternative 1-mix.com
In response to Kim’s earlier question, here’s a complete ebook that we(Curata) have put together to help folks curate in an ethical and effective manner: http://bit.ly/CMDoneRight And certainly please do check us out for a more business grade content curation solution. Our pricing is here: http://www.curata.com/pricing/