In addition to original content, you may post curated content on your social media that your audience will like, comment on, and share. Content curation is a process of finding excellent content that is relevant to your brand, and presenting to your audience in a way that is organized, adds value, and is meaningful.
This helps in engaging with your audience more and keeps your social media active!
But how do you go about doing it? Fret not, as, in this article, we are going to discuss all about content curation and how you may use it for your social media.
What Is Content Curation?
Content curation is when you or your team finds, annotates, organizes, and shares relevant and high-quality content with your target audience.
There are various aspects to this above-mentioned definition. Let’s take a look at these aspects in a bit more detail:
- It is not a computer-generated task; one or more one person is involved in the process of content curation. These people add their own insights into the subject and personalize it so that their audience finds value in it.
- It is a process, is continuous, and not a one-time event.
- It is not merely forwarding third-party content but annotating the content with your own thoughts.
- It is crucial to include your viewpoint to the curated content while keeping your thoughts objective.
- Content must be curated while keeping the target audience in mind. Content should focus on your audience’s questions, issues, and values.
How Does Content Curation Work?
As mentioned above, content curation involves finding relevant content for your business and sharing it in a meaningful way with your audience. You would need to find topics relevant to your brand and locate high-quality content on it.
For deciding what posts you may share on your social media, you may consider:
- How would this content help my audience?
- Is the source trustworthy?
- Is the content worthy of sharing?
- Would the content make the audience happy?
When you find valuable content, you can offer it as craiglist free stuff or share it with your audience on social media, use the social media rule of thirds for scheduling your posts:
- Share a third of content on personal brand promotion.
- Share a third of curated content
- Share a third of content on the conversations taking place on social media
To find and share curated content, consider these aspects:
Your Audience
In the process of content curation, it’s not about you; it’s about your audience.
For instance, you like an article on the effects of a balanced diet on health, but before you share it with your audience, ask yourself the questions listed above.
Keep your audience in mind while sharing content and keep the content relevant to your brand voice.
Share What Matters
Share content that is relevant and useful to your target audience. A content that your audience doesn’t find useful or interesting won’t do well on social media and might overshadow the rest of the content on your page or website.
Personalize The Content
When you’re sharing someone else’s content, add bits of personalization so that your target audience connects with it. Think about how the content made you feel, or something funny that you remembered while reading the content, or a personal story that you may share with your audience.
Personalization helps your audience connect with you and your brand more and makes them find value in the content shared.
Mix Things Up
As mentioned above, keep in your mind the rule of thirds for social media and refrain from sharing too much of the same thing.
If you have a designing business, don’t just share content about self-promotion, but also on the importance of design, the tips and tricks, the behind-the-scenes of your work, and how your audience may find value in design. See what we mean about mixing things up?
Self-Promotion
You may think we’re negating the above point, but we’re not. Self-promotion, in tiny bits, is important too. It helps your business when it is done at the right time and with the right frequency.
We’d say, keep the self-promotion vs. other topics in the ratio 1:10, and you’ll be all good!
Give Credit
Absolutely give credit where it’s due. It would feel good for you and your audience too. Giving credit shows that you took the time and effort to read and annotate someone else’s work and are grateful for their content. Moreover, mentioning the content creator in your post would help in networking opportunities as well!
Schedule Your Posts
It would be better for you if you scheduled your posts in advance, say for a week. However, don’t schedule too much in advance because you still want your posts to be relevant and timely.
Observe And Tweak
When you post curated content, observe how your audience is engaging with it. Through analytics, you’ll be able to figure out what topics are doing well and what topics aren’t. This will give you a clear idea of what to change and would help you in forming a future strategy for social media. With observation and a little bit of experimentation, you’ll be able to create a successful strategy for your brand.
Wrapping Up
Content curation is the process of searching for relevant content, annotating, organizing, and sharing it on your social media. Curated content needs to add value to your target audience’s life and should be useful for them. When done right, curated content helps in more engagement with your audience and helps in keeping the right balance of content in your feed.
You may go about content curation by observing your audience’s taste, sharing what’s important, personalizing the content, mixing things up, putting a bit of self-promotion in there, giving credit, scheduling your posts, and observing and tweaking the content.
We hope you found this article helpful and would use it to form your own content curation strategy!
