What is content curation?

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