Millennium Magazine_14th Ed_Kerry Davies

Curation means you pull together the best information and resources you can find on the web and bring it to your audience. You make sure that content targets their problems and the solutions your product or service offers. When you share this kind of content, you add your own commentary about why it has value or how it integrates with your own brand. Content curation enables you to offer a steady stream of first-class content without having to create it yourself. While your first thought may be that all you are doing is providing free advertising to your competitors, think again. Content curation has proven to have many powerful benefits. Three Ways Content Curation Benefits Your Business It Builds Your Brand Authority While bringing the best content to your followers saves them time, it also does much more than that alone. It shows that you (your company or brand) understand the niche or industry well enough to discern what’s good and what isn’t. Followers value your careful curation for the information, insights, tools and contacts it delivers to your target group, and you raise your brand’s profile as a thought leader and key commentator. It Extends Your Enterprise Outreach Because content curation brings together the best content that’s out there and places it on your social channels, it means followers share your posts through genuine social interactions. You may not have created the content, but your brand and offer follow it wherever it goes, increasing your outreach. It Builds Relationships with Influencers The originators of the content you curate will be big players and influencers in your niche or industry. Many will re-share your curated content with their own channels as it acts as social proof for their brand and product or service offers. The payback is an elevation of your business’s social media authority because of the influencer’s perceived approval of your brand and message. When this happens, it opens the doorway to building a proactive relationship with the core influencers in your niche. How Do You Find High-Quality Content to Curate? Plowing through the internet “by hand” isn’t the best way to locate and aggregate the content you want to curate to your blog and social media channels — you’ll waste hours if you try. The keys to successful content curation are theme, focus and automation. Pick a single niche topic and sign up to the RSS feeds of the key players whose influence you want to leverage in your strategy. You can also take advantage of the excellent automated aggregation tools and apps available. Furthermore, you can automate content aggregation to a point, but you still need to curate what you find. That means annotating, commenting and linking back to your original sources. In your overall social media content strategy, aim for around 60% curated content and 40% original. Don’t Stress About Content, Curate It Once you integrate content curation into your social media marketing strategy, get the tools you prefer in place and drill down your themes and focus, it becomes simple to develop a “rinse and repeat” workflow, one that doesn’t require you to come up with ideas for content and write or produce everything yourself. A well-planned content curation campaign does most of the heavy lifting for you. This means you’ll always have something of value to share, thus leaving you free to analyze results, fine-tune the strategy and interact with your followers to turn them into customers, subscribers and loyal brand advocates. 20K LIKES 10K SHARES 30K COMMENTS

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