Almost anyone who is active on social media curates content to some extent. It’s almost unavoidable – after all, if you read a great article or see an interesting video, why not share it with your followers too? But, content curation can also be a highly effective tool – one that can actually help you get better results online, whether it’s on social media or on a different channel.

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the why’s and how’s of curating content like a pro.

Why is content curation a good strategy?

When done right – i.e. by putting together a clear strategy – content curation can bring about a lot of benefits for your online presence.

And it’s not just the fact that it’s saving you time since you won’t have to create as much content or as often when you’re sharing others’ content, although that is certainly a big (and very attractive) part of it. Especially as it’s becoming clearer that the amount of content that marketers and businesses will only continue to grow and grow.

So, how else does content curation help?

Well, for one, it breaks up all of your promotional content so it’s not always about you and your business, whether it’s sales posts, your blog posts, or any other content you might create. It’s boring – and sometimes infuriating – to follow someone that is constantly talking about themselves in way or another.

Another big reason why content curation works is that it helps improve engagement, followership, and brand awareness in general. Not to mention, by becoming a regular sharer of quality content, it will help you or your business reach thought-leader status. However, in order to get to this stage, you need to not only be consistent about posting new content, but also make sure that you’re sharing resources that are truly valuable to your target audience.

By curating content from top sources you’ll also be able to build some very valuable connections to thought leaders and social influencers in your list – and these connections can come in very handy in the future. By sharing others’ content, you’ll get more shares in return, more backlinks on top websites, and even the opportunity to work with top influencers in your niche on your marketing campaigns.

If I’ve managed to convince of the value of curating content read on to find out how to get started with your very own strategy:

The basics of content curation

Effective content curation requires more than just sharing quality content because not just any content will help you achieve your goals, whatever they may be.

There are several types of content that you can use in your content curation strategy:

• Relevant news from your niche or news that affects your readers and followers
• Useful resources that help your target audience solve a problem, such as how to guides, e-books, listicles, checklists, and so on
• Case studies and industry reports/studies
• Funny/cute/motivational content – you don’t always have to be on brand with your curated content, but that entirely depends on your strategy. If you believe your audience would appreciate a funny video every once in a while, or a quote to get them motivated, for example, it’s worth using this kind of content every once in a while as a break between all of your “serious” content

The 3 main things you need to keep track of when curating content, are:

• The relevance – any content you share needs to be relevant to your target audience
• The value – curated content, just like the content you create yourself, needs to solve some need of your audiences’ – put simply, there needs to be something useful in that content (or, entertaining)
• The quality – and last but definitely not least, you should only share high-quality content from trusted sources; don’t just quickly share a blog post for example because the headline is very good, take the time to check out the publication first as well as read through the article

As for how to curate content, you’ll need a tool – or 2 – to help.

One of the methods is to use a dedicated content curation tool and share your content using the tool directly. Another method is to find content either from your own sources or using a content curation tool and then using a social media scheduling tool.

Read on for a look at some of the best content curation tools:

PostPlanner

PostPlanner is a great tool for those who want to easily discover amazing content and share it on their social profiles all with the same tool.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can browse for content using a variety of methods: either check through their popular categories like marketing, technology, funny, and top news, or search for content based on the industry you’re in.

However, there’s another option if you already know what you’re looking for more or less; use the search bar to search for any keywords, as well as for Facebook Pages and Twitter handles.

Any content you find can then be easily shared (and you can customize the update too to bring your own thoughts to the table) or you can also schedule the posts you’ve found for later.

Another useful feature is that they grade the content (1 to 5 stars) based on the overall engagement and performance of the post since it’s been shared online.

Feedly

Feedly is one of the best RSS readers on the market; and while you can’t schedule updates with it (you can share them though!), it’s a great tool for keeping with content from a variety of sources.

You can organize all content into different ‘feeds’ (aka categories) so every topic has its own feed.

In terms of content, you can add your own favourites – blogs or any other online publication – to keep track of all their latest content, as well as explore all kinds of topics to find more top content sources to add. Additionally, you can follow YouTube channels  as well, and integrate with Google Alerts to monitor news based on your keywords; this way, you’ll see all content in one place, including mentions of your own brand and your competitors, and any news on your preferred topics that you might’ve otherwise missed.

Conclusion

Content marketing can be very time-consuming, especially as the need to create more new content than ever keeps growing. Content curation can help not only with giving you a reprieve from all this content creation, but also a way to keep getting results for your business.

Do you have a content curation strategy for your business?