Nurturing an audience, like scaling a mountain, requires skill and commitment. Multi-part blog series, in-depth webinars, and e-books are all a part of the process, and they require you or your team to do most of the heavy labor. But, these labor intensive content pieces aren’t an end in themselves. The aim is an engaged audience. With content curation, someone else’s labor sparks the conversation for you.
Think of quality content curation as the sherpa of content marketing — it gets you closer to the goal, while keeping the attention focused on you.
Content curation can:
- Help you establish yourself as a trusted source for quality information about your industry.
- Give you the opportunity to interact with your audience more often.
- Build your own list of possible blog topics, speeding up your writing by providing a ready list of ideas to choose from.
- Make reporting on earned media mentions much easier.
Let’s unpack each of these, then take a look at how BuzzSumo can help.
First, Hootsuite’s Kristina Cisnero provides a great definition of content curation. It is, “the act of discovering, compiling, and sharing existing content with your online followers.”
Becoming a trusted source of information:
As the sheer volume of online media increases, audiences look to trusted sources or experts to help them find the best and most reliable information. When your company helps someone solve a problem or answer a question by connecting them with a resource, you are providing value to your audience. When you do that repeatedly, you become a trusted resource. That type of relational capital keeps you top of mind for customers and potential customers alike.
If you are the first to know and share about an industry trend, your audience relaxes, trusting you to let them know when they need to pay attention to something. They will learn to ignore the clamor of the web, and tune in for your updates. That type of attention is a marketing goldmine.
Meaningful interaction with an engaged audience:
Curation also gives you an opportunity to take an idea or post and put it into a different, unique context for your readers. You can use curation to differentiate your product or solution from others in the industry. You show your audience something, then explain how you are similar or different.
Ideally, any time you share a link to another piece of content, you will help your audience to see why it’s important to you. Sometimes link sharing can feel like a game of hot potato, with lots of people grabbing a link and tossing it to someone else down the content distribution channel.
Audience building requires more than that.
Imagine instead a group of friends at a museum. One of them calls the group over to see a sculpture she likes. Together they turn their attention to the painting and discuss why it matters or doesn’t matter to them.
Hot potatoes don’t build audiences or drive sales as effectively as shared experiences do.
Every piece of content you share in a social channel is an invitation to talk. You are offering your audience an object or an idea to discuss, inviting them to tell you if they like it, if they hate it, or equally valuable, have no opinion or emotion about the topic at all.
When you curate well, you have these conversations more often, and less expensively, because you don’t have to create all of the content yourself.
Building a list of possible blog topics:
Knowing what content resonates with your audience makes your content creation easier and more effective. When you know the types of content that your audience likes, you can give them more of those things.
In this way, content marketing resembles feeding a family. If you know that you have a group of people with milk allergies, you won’t serve cheese tortellini. If you know they love chicken soup, you’ll serve that instead. Everyone wins.
Gathering examples of posts that align with your audience’s preferences provides a great beginning point for writing. Instead of staring at a blank screen, wondering what to write, you can open your list, chose a post that is relevant, skim it for ideas, and ask yourself how you can add something of value to the conversation.
In many cases, you can use posts that inspire you to begin influencer relationships, too. Quote the author; ask for an interview; link to them.
Showcasing your success:
Collect your earned media mentions to showcase ways your content marketing strategy is earning its keep. Having a tool or system in place to gather links to articles that mention or link to your brand is a key part of measuring ROI.
Using BuzzSumo’s new Saved Content to Curate Content:
Our new Saved Content feature makes curating content much easier.
When you find a great piece of content in a BuzzSumo search, just bookmark the article and add it to the appropriate list.
All of the normal filtering options are available, so if you are looking for something very specific, you can find it and bookmark it for later.
Everything can be easily accessed via the Saved Content tab.
Share totals make it easy to find the content pieces that resonate most with your audience.
You can share the content right away, or pull it into Buffer or Pocket to read or post later. You can also sort your lists based on different types of engagement, or export them to CSV or Excel files.
Saved Content can also be used to create a custom list of URL’s that you can use to monitor sharing activity.
You can keep track of URL’s with your own byline, or someone else’s byline. Or you can monitor the performance of content pieces associated with a particular campaign.
When it’s time to report on how successful the campaign was, you will have the information you need quickly available in your saved lists.
If you would like to learn more about content curation, you can check out our webinar:
How to curate content for more engagement
Friday, Oct. 7, 10 a.m. EST/3 p.m. UK
The post 4 Reasons to Get Serious About Content Curation, and a New Tool to Help appeared first on BuzzSumo.
Delores Comberley 