You might be wondering what content curation and content aggregation actually are. In today's post, we're going to explain how you can use these two powerful marketing tactics to improve your social media campaign. Best of all, once you know how to do them, they'll add lots of great content to your pages.
Content Curation 101
Content curators scour the internet for valuable content, which they then share with their social communities. If you're going to become a content curation pro, you'll need to learn how to source the right content, and how to present this content to your fans in new and exciting ways. When you curate content for your social sites, it adds a new dimension to your pages.
- Content curation begins with sourcing. To find the best content online you need to be a part of many different social communities. Subscribe to blog feeds, and Twitter feeds that provide great content. Use bookmarking tools like StumbleUpon to discover unique, rare content on the net. Finally, you should set up some Google Alerts to keep track of certain niche topics.
- Once you've gathered your fresh content, and deemed it worthy to republish on your social sites, the next step is 'the attention grabber.' Read the post thoroughly and create short updates that introduce the content to your community. Say something interesting and create a really great headline for each post. Never publish content without your own input or insight!
Content Aggregation 101
Content aggregation can be confusing, because there are two forms of it. The first is the aggregation of content, which simply means syndicating someone else's content that you found from their feed.
The second is creating and publishing content that you've written yourself, then aggregating it. You can see how people get content curation and content aggregation mixed up!
The difference between the first form of content aggregation and content curation is this: aggregation is automated and collects info based on keywords. Curation on the other hand is basically manual.
In our opinion, content curation is the most valuable of the two. Automated posts have their place, but it's not really in a strong social curation strategy. You should be complimenting your own content, with the best sundry content you can find, manually, on the internet.
It's harder than it sounds. Anyone can grab the same old authority articles and use them. But then your social pages aren't really giving your readers anything new. What you need to do, is get out there and search for the really obscure content. The stuff no one has seen, because the creator doesn't bother optimizing it.
This is what will make your post shares special. Give your readers the best of the best, not just what Google thinks is the best, because a marketing team optimized that site. Dig deep, and uncover those rare blogs, feeds and networks that are small but out of this world.
How do you gather valuable content and share it with your community? Share your thoughts with us below!