Creating quality content takes time and resources. If a shortage of time and resources is never a problem for you, then please get in touch because I know a marketer or two (yours truly included) who would like to know how you do it! The rest of us mere mortals have learned to cope with our limitations. One of the ways we have adapted is through the art of curation – arguably the most effective strategy for managing the battle between a need for content and a lack of time/resources. 

So, what is content curation? Heidi Cohen, a well-known content marketing industry leader, defines content curation as finding “the most relevant, highest quality digital information to meet your readers’ needs on a specific subject. It involves a process of assembling, categorizing, commenting and presenting the top content. This digital content can be in one or more formats such as text, blogs, feeds, images, video and presentations.”

This is not a new concept. In fact, way back in 2012, Curata reported that content curation was no longer a “new” or “innovative” practice – it was considered the norm. As it is an effective and efficient practice, the trend continues to be true today. 

Aside from keeping readers happy and marketers sane, let’s explore a few other reasons why marketers rely on a content curation strategy and how you can make someone else’s content work for you.

Curation Takes Many Forms

Content curation can happen in many ways. The most conventional way to curate is aggregation. As Heidi explained, aggregation is sourcing content that is relevant to your readers and sharing it through your own channels (appropriately sourced, of course).

In addition to the traditional use, there are a few other, often overlooked, curation formats:

• Distillation is the act of compiling two or three pieces of content and sharing them as the focal point in your own content. An example of this in action are our weekly Content Roundups. 
• Research or mashups are the blending of original or curated content into a new fresh take on the topic, similar to this post. 
• And finally, a chronology is when you present many sources to pinpoint topics or thoughts from specific times, in the order they happened.

Time and Resources 

As I mentioned, many modern marketers are faced with a lack of time and resources - we are expected to do a lot with very little. Even though this is our reality, statistics show that 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than a year ago. Using the above-outlined curation methods we are able to rework much of the efforts put in by our peers.

Another positive aspect of curation is that you will be sharing content from other marketers with your networks. Hopefully, those same marketers will share your original content with their networks, thus helping you both gain exposure!

Social Sharing 

On average Uberflip tweets 24 times a day, one in three of those is curated content from another marketer. When sharing content from other sources, I like to use it as an opportunity to say thanks to the author or website who initially produced the content, elevating our tweets from a one-way information push to a share + interaction opportunity! For Uberflip, curating social content ensures we always have a fresh new tweet for our followers, preventing our social feeds from looking stale and eliminating the overuse of our own original content.

Curating social content also allows you to open lines of communication with other thought leaders in our industry. This twitter conversation we shared with Digital Sherpa is a perfect example. I curated their content on twitter and thanked them for the article. They, in turn, replied and together we elevated what was once a one-way tweet into a conversation. Yay, social engagement! 

Connect With Thought Leaders 

In the above example, we discovered that social sharing was a way to open lines of communication with industry thought leaders.The benefits of curating thought leader content do not stop there. Curating content from thought leaders also signals to your readers that you know who sets the trends and revolutionizes your industry. You may even find that your own content is shared for this same reason! 

Over time your brand will become more recognizable through interactions with high-visibility people, potentially helping you open new doors to clients, bloggers, news sites and even thought leaders themselves.

The information provided above offers the benefits of content curation.