With the instant availability of meaningful content, videos on You Tube, millions of blog scrolls and other informational gateways, organizations are finding the need for content curators in social media. Content curation is the method of locating, organizing and sharing online content. Frankly, we need curators to go through the lofty task of wading through endless scrolls of information until they find the hidden gems. What curators do is weed out the bad and present us with the good: the information that's interesting, intriguing, things that fit our tastes, enrich our lives and, more importantly, that helps make our online experience more enjoyable.Content curation has gone mainstream and and there are countless people relying on it to free them from the muddled online world.
Content Curation Manners: ABCD Rule
Accumulation: This is the most generic way of curation, which involves showcasing accordant content in one single location. That could be your college blog or college information portal.
Blend: Repackaging and blending different content to create an original point of view.
Chronology: Timelined curation to present the evolution of subject matter.
Distillation : Brew the overall noise to its most accordant concept.
Content Curation Tools:
There are a large variety of tools that can help you surpass informal endeavors to help increase organizational social media and content marketing attempts. The free content tools range from self-discovery through Google searches, Social Mentions, Pinterest and Twilert, to publishing and posting solutions like Clipboard, Scoop.it and Storify. Here is a list of some free but useful curation tools:
Pinterest (Invite only): Probably the most talked about social portal of 2012 so far. Great way to discover/share content visually ( images and videos).
Scoop.it : It's a premium content curation site with an amazing user interface. It's mainly meant to be used for external content but again you can curate almost every type of content. Scoop.it also offers the opportunity to republish your curated content on your blog (via widgets and feeds), so if your college is operating a WordPress or Tumblr blog, you can connect it with your category and syndicate your curated content there.
Storify: One of the most popular and user friendly curation websites. You can add content by either simply dragging and dropping or using bookmarklet.
Google reader: Curates content via RSS feed. It also provides a way to organize curated content into related categories, and isone of the most popular curation tools within the B2B marketing community.
Faveous: Provides an ability to curate from Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook, YouTube and many other social media giants.
Then there are the larger formats that cost money. For instance, CITread and Curata are
created exclusively to aid the content curation requirements of marketers and publishers.
Do it effectively:
Content curation famously helped made The Huffington Posta big hit, and it can do wonders for your business social marketing efforts as well. The only catch is you have to do it properly. Here are some best practices to consider:
Focus: Stay on the top of your subject; don't dilute your expertise by curating off-topic content.
Share, but don't steal: Always give credit to the original writer/content creator.
Consistency: Curate regularly, it helps build a loyal audience base
Give voice: Don't just share, have something intelligent to add to the content you've curated.
Doing an excellent job in content curation entails an understanding of your community and
of how to properly use search and publishing tools. Superb content curation is actually a little bit of science and art thrown together, requiring a razor sharp eye and an instinct for thematic material that line up with the know-how of executives, brand qualities and reader interests.
There are essentially three elements that work together in creating great content curation,and these elements are subject matter proficiency, an acute objective and a strong tone in response to an article, tweet or post that appears at the focal point of your expertise. When this happens, you'll know that you are writing words that matter.
People increasingly depend on social media as a resource for the most up-to-date and pertinent information out there. Through content curation, your college blogs can rapidly and easily get their content out in the social media world and keep their readers alert.
All major colleges are trying to leverage online presence as much as posiible, and this means that they need to be searchable and have a sticky fly-trap portal which is important for their online success.
How has your business leveraged content curation to help you meet your social media marketing goals? Chime in!