What Is Curated Content? Benefits, Best Practices, and Tools

Curated content is a great way to boost engagement, keep your readers interested, and speed up your social media tasks.

Content curation enables you to present engaging, informative, and inspiring content handpicked from reliable sources, freeing up your day and improving your social media presence. 

So what is curated content, how is it created, and what are the best sources and tools to use? Keep reading to find out.

Key Takeaways

• Content curation is finding and sharing another company or site’s high-quality, relevant content with your audience.
• Content marketers use curated content in a variety of ways, including for social media posts, blog posts, newsletters, article roundups, and more.
• It’s important to properly cite your curated content sources so you’re not plagiarizing the material.
• Conducting thorough research is essential to the content curation process to locate quality sources and material that is relevant to your topic.
• Useful tools are available online to assist you in your content curation strategy, including UpContent and Google news alerts.

Definition of Curated Content

Content curation is finding and sharing another company or site’s high-quality, relevant content with your audience. These materials can include blog posts, articles, news stories, report writing, newsletters, quotes, trends, and industry information.

Since it originates from another source, you must always give the curated article source credit. Though it’s someone else’s original material, sharing it benefits both parties — it allows you to post exceptional content relevant to your audience and furthers the source’s reach too. Add your own commentary to the content to help it get more attention when shared and start a conversation.

The designated content curator at your company will search and sort through information online to find relevant content to share on social networks, websites, and blogs. Content curators stay on top of trends and ensure their audiences get a great mix of relevant content. In this way, content curators play an important role in keeping their audiences current with the latest news and information.

Benefits of Content Curation

Creating a content curation strategy has many benefits, including the following:

1. Saves time: Content curation saves time and resources by allowing you to share high-quality content without creating it yourself.
2. Establishes thought leadership: By curating relevant content, you’re establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry, which helps build brand authority.
3. Boosts engagement: Sharing curated content on social media platforms increases brand awareness, engagement, and followers, which enhances your social media presence.
4. Improves SEO efforts: Content curation boosts your website or blog’s SEO performance by providing fresh content.
5. Provides diverse perspectives: Curated content gives your audience new and varied perspectives to engage with.

How to Curate Content for Your Audience

Content curation is an essential part of any successful content marketing strategy. It involves finding and sharing high-quality, relevant content that your audience will find valuable. By following these tips on how to curate content for your audience effectively, you can build trust with them while establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry:

Define Your Target Audience

Before you start curating content, you need to define your target market. Who are they? What are their interests, pain points, and needs? This information will help you identify the type of content they would find useful.

Create a List of Sources

Once you know your target audience, identify reliable sources of information that align with their interests and needs. These could be industry publications, blogs, newsletters, thought leaders, or social media accounts. Conducting thorough research for articles, podcasts, and videos on your selected topic is vital to the successful outcome of your curated content project. By digging deep and exploring various sources, you’ll locate material that will help you craft a well-written article, tweet, social post, blog roundup, and more.

Evaluate Content Quality

Not all content is created equal. Before sharing any content with your audience, whether a social media post or article, evaluate its quality to ensure it meets your expectations. Look for well-researched articles, engaging visuals, and credible sources.

Add Value

Don’t just share content without adding value to it. Provide context by adding your own insights or commentary that makes the content more valuable to your audience. They want to hear your perspective on what you’re sharing, so tell them why you find it insightful, helpful, or entertaining. Ensure it relates back to your brand or it can confuse your followers.

Be Consistent

Consistency is key when it comes to content curation. Set a schedule for sharing curated content with your audience and stick to it.

Measure Results

Track the performance of the curated content you share with your audience by monitoring engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments.

Tips for Effective Content Curation

Keep the following best practices in mind when you curate content for your audience.

Start Conversations With Other Brands

Curated content allows you to build strong personal relationships with other brands, which will help in future curation projects. Be sure to tag or link the brand in your social posts or blog posts to keep your relationship positive. Showing other companies love can lead to them doing the same, which means you both can benefit from your pool of followers or subscribers.

Use Trustworthy Sources

Curating content effectively requires trustworthy and accurate sources. If you bring poor-quality content into the mix, your audience will be disappointed and quickly lose interest. Plus, it can make your company look less credible and spammy. Using subpar material also damages the reputation of the brands you use to promote your product. Before sharing content, take the time to verify sources and check their accuracy. Also, perform a Google search on the brands or people to check for any bad press, scandals, or PR issues to ensure your values align.

Add Your Own Thoughts

Adding your point of view makes your content stand out. By combining high-quality material with your viewpoint, you create compelling content that engages your readers. Adding your own commentary will also boost your credibility in your industry, as it showcases your knowledge and experience.

Curate With Your Audience in Mind

Knowing your target audience is important when you curate content. You’ll want to provide engaging material that resonates with your readers. Consider creating buyer personas for your customers. Buyer personas are documented fictional customer profiles that fit your brand. The data in the persona includes age, location, gender, income, occupation, hobbies, and interests. To get a good idea who your target readers are, check social media posts, conduct polls, or ask them directly what topics interest them.

Create a Schedule

Planning a schedule for your curated content ensures your material is always current. With an effective scheduling strategy, your content reaches the right people at the right time. Scheduling your posts helps build up your followers over time, as they will know when to expect new content. There are various social media management tools available online that will help you plan and schedule your content and analyze its performance, like HootSuite, Loomly, and Later.

Avoid Off-Topic Content

As you curate content, you’ll encounter many engaging and informative articles. While it’s tempting to include every interesting post you find, sharing anything off-topic detracts from your original purpose and can be off-putting to followers.

Don’t Rely Solely Only on Curated Content

Your goal for creating curated content is to combine original and curated content to engage your audience on a regular basis. However, it’s important to create your own brand presence without solely relying on the work of others. Think of curation as an additive — not the main ingredient.

Useful Tools for Content Curation

There are many tools and websites that can help you identify and organize your content. Below are the three popular sites that offer an efficient way to manage content.

UpContent

UpContent finds valuable content for curation using a proprietary web crawler and machine learning algorithms and can be seamlessly integrated across all digital channels. You can sort, read, and collaborate on articles and blog posts using their highly customizable options.

Workweek’s Curated Newsletters

From people and culture to social media marketing and fintech, you can sign up for Workweek‘s industry experts’ free newsletters for a regular source of curated content. Each newsletter features the creator’s perspective on a trending, timely, or hot-button issue or topic, which makes for highly quotable tweets, social posts, and more. Each newsletter also contains a selection of editorial articles and sponsored content for additional sources of curated content.

Google News Alerts

Google News Alerts is a great way to get the latest news on your go-to curated content topics. The site allows you to customize your topics and keyword phrases that you want to follow. You can also set alerts to notify you of any input about your posts.

Summing Up

So what is curated content? It’s relevant content from another brand that you share with your own audience on social media, your blog, or website. It’s clear that there are many benefits to using curation in your content marketing strategy. A major advantage is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel whenever you want to share information or create something new.

Having a readily available collection of high-quality content makes content curation a powerful tool. There is no shortage of informative topics to explore to attract and engage your audience. Content curation helps your business stay ahead of the curve by providing your audience with a constant feed of new ideas and information. Your business gains more visibility while improving customer relationships. This makes content curation a win-win for everyone.