Analytics are like a drug to me. I am addicted. Okay, I guess I can say that about LinkedIn too. But in all honesty, not a day goes by where I'm not logging into our statistics to see where our traffic comes from.
More often than not, I'm seeing traffic coming from specific content related sites. It is partly an effort of our own blog promotion and partly a reaction to content curators out there who are sharing our content. This makes a blogger very happy!
In this article, we'll get down to business about how you can curate content for branding yourself and your business as an expert in your field.
What Is Content Curation?
Content Curation, in its most simplest terms, is the act of gathering related, targeted pieces of content and sharing it. Like an art curator, a Content Curator is a taste maker—an influencer—and has authority in a given topic. You can curate content that you create and curate the content that is important or interesting to you and your brand.
Who Are The Content Curators?
Content Curators can be anyone who engages and shares content online. The best Content Curators are those who are focused on a specific content. These are the people who are scouring the web for interesting and related content on a given topic. The beauty of it is that you can be a curator on any topic. In being a Content Curator, you are staying informed about your field of interest and building expertise. Oftentimes, Content Curators are Influencers, because they share highly targeted information to a group of devoted followers.
Why Is Content Curation Important To Businesses?
Content Curation is important to businesses because it allows you to brand yourself as an expert in a certain topic and allows you to be a thought leader. By doing a good job, and curating content that is powerful and shareable, you can become a go-to authority on a topic. As you know, branding is very important in the social media world. In curating content, you're branding yourself as an expert. Enough said.
Where To Curate Content
Instagram is a great place to curate photos and content about specific topics. Of course, keep in mind that the content here is visual, so a visual field will work best. I have seen a lot of fashion aggregative Instagram profiles, as well as an influx of fan pages. This is a good example of how you can curate content on a specific brand or person.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a content curation tool that allows you to create Scoops. I like it because I can use it to promote our blog post, especially since the following at Scoop.it is growing. It's always good to get into a site during its beginning stages, so this is a good opportunity for you.
Learni.st
Like Scoop.it, Learni.st is a content curation tool that encourages you to learn about a specific topic. This is a great site for those of us who are highly-targeted, educationally-focused Content Curators. Learn.ist is also in its beginning stages, so it would be good to build there before it becomes suddenly overpacked.
With Pinterest boards, Content Curation comes easy. Pin the content you like and there you have it. Pinterest is also great because it shows up highly on the search engines. Make sure your board names are relevant to the content you are pinning and you could be very successful here.
Tumblr
Tumblr is a good site to gather content on a specific topic. Since you can Tumblr search, track Tags and Reblog quite easily, this site is a good place to start. As I mentioned, content curation is about focusing on specific kinds of content. So Tumblr's features (tracking and saving Tags to your Dash, having your posts Featured by the Tumblr staff and Tumblr Post Editors, and latching on to Reblog chains) can be easily keyed to your interests, your brand and the subject of your content curation. The more active you are in the Tumblr community, the better.
Spundge
A few weeks ago I noticed an influx of traffic coming from a site called Spundge. Of course, I had to check it out. I instantly signed up, put my investigation cap on, and dug a little deeper on how I could use this tool to a.) drive traffic to our blog, and b.) use it as a branding tool to help further build our authority on the topics of content marketing and social media marketing.
Spundge is a content curation tool on crack. Not only does it allow you to create a notebook (similar to a Pinterest Pinboard) in order to gather content you like, it also allows you to collaborate with team members, Influencers and others on your topics. But best of all, it acts like an RSS feed in which you can filter highly-targeted content to learn about and share with the community via your social channels. With Spundge, there are a ton of other really cool features and I definitely recommend you check them out.
Blogs
Of course, your blog can be a place to create content and curate content as well. You can create a weekly article about the best links of the week, or something along those lines. Actually, your blog is the most important place to curate, as it represents your brand like nothing else can.
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