Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

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.

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.

It’s human, it’s simple, it’s visual and it’s curated.

“OK, don’t forget about big data – it’s a big deal,” Sorofman wrote in a recent blog. “But, these, days content may be giving data a run for it money.

For instance, Gartner’s 2013 Digital Marketing Spending Survey found that content creation and social marketing accounted for 21 per cent of digital marketing budgets and as much as 47 per cent of companies see content creation and curation as the top role of their social marketing teams. The survey queried 200 marketers from North American firms with more than $500 million in annual revenues on how they allocate their budgets and which activities are contributing to their success....

Today, there are so many options available and we each have to find a way to find, filter, consume and share the information that is relevant for us.

I use email alerts from RSS feeds, Twitter lists and a few key websites I visit every day to make sure I can stay on top of the latest trends and news in business and marketing. So here, I have curated my own list of the top sites of business and marketing information – some of which are great examples of content curation themselves.

I invite you to visit these content curation resources, subscribe to their RSS feeds or follow them on twitter. I’ve also created a twitter list of these resources and other influential bloggers that you can also subscribe to…

Museums curate works of art. We digital marketers curate blog posts.

Though our link shares may not be artistic contributions, the idea of curation is at least the same at museums and online: We’re all seeking only the best material to pass along to our patrons, customers, fans, or followers.

Finding and sharing exquisite content  has never had more value than it does today.People love being told what’s good to read or essential to see. With that in mind, we’ve collected some ways to get started with curation and to do so as efficiently and expertly as possible....

Sharing content with your audience is a great way to create awareness, show expertise, grow your brand, and create relationships. Any brand can use content sharing as a way to increase visibility. All it takes is putting the proper steps in place.

... You can't rest on a great product and go radio silent; you need to build a great brand. That takes differentiating yourself and establishing higher visibility. It takes content. The content you create via a strategic content strategy, but also via the third-party content and resources you routinely share.

Establishing yourself as a trusted sharer of content has many positive benefits to your brand. It asserts your expertise in the niche, brands you as the go-to source of information (even when you aren't the one creating it!) and positively links you with the industry you are a part of. Any brand can use content sharing as a way to increase visibility; it just takes putting the proper steps in place.

How do you become a content-sharing ninja? Here's my method....

... Now Readability, with has 5 million monthly active users stripping out and reading tens of millions of articles each day, is launching Top Reads, a reading aggregation service of its own based on the most read stories on Readability, to get more people to spend more time on its platform. Top Reads will launch first as a responsive web app for desktop and mobile screens, and Rich Ziade, one of Readability’s founders, says that there will be dedicated native mobile apps on the way in a matter of months if the response is good.

Top Reads is not exactly new — it a feature that first appeared as a list in Readability’s mobile app last year, and has been getting strong traffic since, with about two-thirds of the site’s 5 million users using it every month. Enough attention, he said, to get Ziade and his team to explore making it into a standalone service with its own URL. “Discovery is a still big deal,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re getting swamped with stuff to read.” And while his app has developed a dedicated audience using it to read content they are finding themselves, this will help them look at what others are reading, too....

While content marketing quickly went from “what’s that” to “must have” in 2012, the biggest challenges marketers face are producing enough of the right type of content and having resources, both budget and staff, for creating content. Content curation supplements original content for both broadly and narrowly focused topics. Through the editorial process, it adds original content and provides an opportunity to showcase relevant gems.

Content curation as part of content marketing strategy – 3 Facts

Almost 60% of content marketers use some form of content curation according to Curata’s 2012 B2B Marketing Trends Report. Doing curation well can give you a competitive advantage because it’s a low cost way to expand your content marketing offering....

What is Swayy? It’s like Percolate and LinkedIn recommended articles, mixed with trending keywords for the topics you find interesting, combined with an analytics dashboard that shows the trends of what you do and how people react to it. I like it for the simplicity and accuracy of the content curation. Everything I’m actually interested in reading is in one place – I don’t have to skip from another major tech blog over to Harvard Business Review then hop over to another major tech or business blog. It’s all in there. And it has saved me So Much Time....