Over the past few years, content marketing has continued to grow in popularity and effectiveness. Savvy marketers know that creating valuable content for their target audience has numerous benefits, but they also know how difficult it is to create engaging content. That’s where content curation can be a lifesaver for small business marketers. Learn how curating content can help your content marketing efforts.

What does curating content mean?

content curationContent curation is about finding great content and presenting it to your social media followers in a way that adds value. According to Hootsuite, more than simply re-sharing content, curation is a way to provide extra value to your followers while highlighting your own industry expertise. You’re taking the legwork out of finding helpful content for your readers by adding value and showing your readers that you’re committed to providing useful content that they can use. Content can be a blog, speech, video, infographic, or any other form of content that showcases helpful information. Content curation isn’t new at all. At the most basic level, every time you retweet on Twitter, you’re implementing a form of content curation, sharing someone else’s content with your audience.

Why small business marketers should embrace curating content

marketing ideasAt first glance, curating content versus creating and sharing your own unique content might seem counterintuitive. As small business marketing professionals, we’ve been told the value of creating strong, useful content for our readers for years, showcasing our expertise and ideally driving prospects to our own website in hopes of generating new business. That’s still a fantastic idea but let’s face it, content marketing is hard, and creating fresh, new, helpful content regularly can be a real challenge. That’s where curating content can be effective in keeping your content marketing efforts consistent. Here are a few benefits of curating content:

  • Helps to maintain a diverse, consistent posting cadence on social media
  • Provides useful content to your readers
  • Establishes you and your small business as thought leaders
  • Helps build your network as you share/support industry content

While you don’t want to replace your efforts of creating original content with content curation, supplementing your current content with other industry pieces can add a lot of value and save you a lot of time.

A few best practices with curating content

best practicesAs you might imagine, there is a fine line between sharing other’s work in the name of curation and outright plagiarism, so take care to do the following when sharing content others have created:

  • Credit the original source – if you’re resharing or retweeting on social channels, that means keeping the handle of the original content creator in the post, so people know the work you’re sharing isn’t yours.
  • Add a short comment to the content you’re sharing, giving a nod to the original source while adding your own take on the content.
  • If the content comes from someone’s website, be sure to link back to the original source to avoid any confusion that the content might be yours.
  • Be sure to really read the content before you share it. Even though it’s not yours, sharing the content indicates you agree with what is being said.

Other ways to curate content

While social media is definitely the easiest way to curate content, you can also curate content in other ways, such as:

  • Blog posts sharing industry content
  • Showcasing a grouping of videos such as “10 Digital Marketing Videos You Must Watch.”
  • Highlighting industry news in a newsletter (e.g., “Your Monthly Marketing Industry Roundup”)

Need more ideas? Smart Insights created a list of content curation ideas a few years back; it’s still just as relevant today.

Curating content is a smart move for small business marketers looking to enhance their current content marketing efforts while diversifying the valuable information they share with their readers. Follow the suggestions above to see how content curation can help your marketing efforts.

Patty Hughes
Follow Us!
Latest posts by Patty Hughes (see all)