Content curation involves searching for, organizing and preparing digital artifacts to share with your audience. By curating, filtering and making sense of information shared or created by users, you can save time and money in your content creation efforts.
Art curators collect and organize art pieces to make them more coherent in exhibits. When it comes to social media marketing, content curation involves sifting through myriad external sources and sharing the most interesting information relevant to your audience.
Learn more about user-generated content curation, the benefits of content curation and how you can use it to boost your social media marketing.
What Is User Generated Content Curation?
Curating user-generated content (UGC) allows your organization to promote the voice of the customer while increasing engagement and validating your brand. UGC can save time and allow you to allocate your content creators more effectively. When you find relevant user content to share, creative annotation and repackaging help you create a unique message focused on your brand.
Stamped.io is the perfect tool for visual content curation. This tool helps you give your customers a voice while enhancing your brand. Choose from templates and customizable display options that help you showcase Instagram videos and photos. You can also organize your visual content into albums for easy cataloging and reuse. Additionally, Stamped.io makes it easy to create visual reviews to share on your social media platforms.
Benefits of Content Curation
Writing blogs, social media posts and website service pages takes time and energy. Therefore, it makes sense to use content creation to maximize your resources. Content creation allows you to enhance your marketing by sharing curated posts on social media. It also presents reviews, opinions and reactions to trending topics such as breaking news. For example, you can build your audience by recapping industry events or sharing the opinions of thought leaders in a roundup-style post.
Here are some of the advantages of content curation:
- Establishes your brand as a thought leader
- Promotes lead generation
- Promotes community building when you share user content
- Complements SEO efforts
- Provides valuable resources for blogging and social media post
- Enables you to create a knowledge database
- Builds interest in your social media sites
- Reveals new trends and needs
Let's take a look at content creation strategies that can improve your social media marketing results.
5 Content Curation Strategies to Boost Your Social Media Marketing
Here are five strategies to help keep your content curation relevant and improve your brand messaging on social media.
1. Balance Your Content Curation
Follow the rule of thirds to create balanced content for social media marketing. This strategy involves evenly dividing your social media posts into the following:
- Original content that promotes your business and drives conversions
- Curated ideas and resources that help establish your brand as a thought leader
- Personal interactions such as relationship building and conversations that include your online community
Creating a variety of content helps you keep your messaging centered on the audience, not on your brand. It also helps establish your sites and pages as useful sources of information.
2. Provide Context With Curated Content
There's a lot of information out there. Trying to find relevant, high-quality content can be a bit daunting for people. Not to mention time-consuming.
If you're sharing content on social media, you're offering a valuable, helpful service. By providing a filter, as well as sharing some context, you're making it easier for your audience to discover and understand information that's important to them. If you're sharing content that is consistently good (which it should be!), you'll become a go-to source of information. And when you do share your own content, it'll be seen as coming from a trusted source.
3. Give Ample Credit to Original Sources
To establish authenticity and trust, it's important to give credit to the originators of content you share. You do this by sharing user-generated content repackaged to tie into your branding. Repurposing published content does it mean passing it off as your own. In fact, you can gain credibility and generate excitement when you share user content.
You may find your online community competing to provide content to share with your wider audience. It's important to make a clear distinction between content shared from your website and other original sources versus content that originally appeared on another site or user post.
4. Follow This Formula to Improve SEO
To maximize the reach and impact of user-generated content creation, follow these simple guidelines:
- Tag the author or publication where you found the content
- Use one to three hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms
- Create a blurb summarizing the content
- Explain why it's relevant to your audience
- Pick shocking or interesting facts to tease the content (inspiring quotes also work)
- Ask a question to generate comments and conversation
5. Become a Thought Leader
To establish your personal or company brand as a thought leader, it's important to share the best content that's most relevant to your followers and prospective customers. Adding your own insights to shared content doesn't have to be elaborate. Often, an introduction of one or two sentences can add a unique perspective and show you really understand what's going on in the industry.
Content Curation Tools
The internet is full of great content curation examples. Here are the top tools that help you find great user content to share with your followers and customers.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite has a dashboard that makes it easy to find user content. You can also schedule the posts to fill out your content calendar. Creating streams based on industry keywords can produce updated feeds of useful content. Then, you choose the most interesting posts and content to repackage and share.
Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo also generates content searches based on industry keywords. You could also flag content that generates conversation to help you improve your content curation strategy over time. This tool creates lasting value by helping you measure and improve your curation efforts.
Flipboard bills its platform as a way to curate stories from around the world. This tool can help you stay informed about industry developments and create inspiration for curated or original content.
Twitter Lists
When you spot content relevant to your brand or industry, you can add it to a Twitter List. This can help you spot worthy content simply by scrolling through your Twitter feed. Hootsuite and other tools can help you organize your Twitter Lists.
Feedly
Feedly helps you research topics and trends that are relevant to your followers. It's a self-funded community that optimizes the time of its users, which adds credibility to anything posted there. Also, you can categorize blogs and group content in useful ways that facilitate content curation.
UpContent
UpContent automatically trawls the internet for useful content you can share with your users. It has great tools for filtering content by shareability and influence.
Stamped
Stamped.io has an effective visual user-generated content platform to help you create compelling posts. When you partner with Stamped.io, you increase brand awareness and engagement. Further, the right packaging increases your shares and conversions.
