Content Curation: A guideline on how to start

Preface

Content creation plays a big part in expanding your brand name to a broader audience. However, creating original content takes a lot of time, and with how fast organizations produce content nowadays, it can take a lot of work to keep up. That’s where content curation comes in handy to engage your audience, spread your brand, and create relationships with others.

We’ve created a guideline on how to start with your content curation and the tools you’ll need to curate and distribute content successfully. Below you will find simple steps to get the best out of content curation.

Why You Need Curated Content

Content curation is sharing content created by others that already exist on the internet. There are several benefits to sharing curated content on your platform:

Builds Brand Trust and Authority

Find content that is interesting and helpful for your employees. You present yourself as a knowledgeable authority your customers can turn to when you do that. Sharing content that positively mentions your brand can also help build brand trust.

Grows Your Online Community

By sharing quality content and engaging stories, you not only engage with current customers but also widen your reach to a large audience. Sharing other people’s content also helps you start to form relationships with other thought leaders and influencers. It’s a great way to put your brand on their radar and utilize each other’s network to grow your audience base.

Positions You as the Thought Leadership

When you share relevant content, you can start interesting conversations about topics your target audience cares about. With time, your brand will become associated with topics you share consistently.

Organizing relevant and exciting content for your customers helps make you the go-to source and thought leader for specific topics. People generally look up to leaders for ideas and solutions. When you position yourself as the thought leader, you attract a wider audience who will follow you and turn to you for advice.

Effective content curation also requires a lot of time researching and reading industry news and content. When you do that, you stay updated with the latest trends, which gives you an advantage around changes and evolutions in your market.

How To Set up a Content Curation Program

An effective content curation strategy takes time and commitment. It requires time to find different, authentic, and engaging content. The best content often requires some digging. After finding possible content to use, you need to read it thoroughly, not just the title and summary. The content must be worth sharing. And lastly, you’ll want to share the content through various marketing and communications channels. That way, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience group and expand business opportunities.

1. Know Your Audience

To know what content will be relevant and engaging, you must first identify your audience and understand their interests. You may already have a good idea from creating your own content. You must spend just as much effort aligning your target audience’s interests with your curated content. It might also be helpful to analyze your competition’s audience and what drives them. Some questions you should ask yourself include:

1. Is this content related to our brand, product, or industry?
2. Does this content resonate with my target audience?
3. How does this content help my target audience?
4. Does this fit our brand messaging and our target audience’s perceptions of our brand?
5. What type of content is my competition sharing? Is it generating engagement?

2. Decide on a Content Curation Ratio

Even with so much content on the web to share, you’ll still want to create your own. Find a balance between sharing curated content and original content. The ratio will vary from one business to another, so use A/B testing to experiment and find your ideal ratio.

Here are three crucial tips to keep in mind:

• Make sure the time periods are all the same length.
• Make sure the tests have the same starting day of the week.
• Your test needs to be long enough for you to gather significant data. A month is generally a long enough time to see emerging trends.

You might start with a 60/40 ratio, where 60% of your content is curated, and 40% is created. From there, experiment and see if other ratios work better for your business.

3. Find Relevant Content

Sharing content is to inform, entertain, or educate your audience. Try to find content that is helpful to your audience without appearing overly promotional or spammy.

There are many places to find relevant content. Below are a few places where you can start:

• Social media: There’s a plethora of trending content on these platforms. Not only is there a rich well of content, but social media posts also lend themselves to easy sharing and reposting.
• Newsletters and publications: You can also subscribe to newsletters and follow publications that may not be as mainstream. The advantage of sharing less-known content that still offers quality advice is that it’s different and unique, which helps your brand stand out.
• Content that mentions your brand: These may be in the form of reviews or customer experiences. By sharing the content of others mentioning your brand, you still get your brand visibility without overly promoting yourself, which can be a turn-off after a while. Additionally, you build brand trust because your audience sees that other customers have had positive interactions with you.

Once you’ve found relevant content, try incorporating some of your own thoughts or events that tie back to your organization. Original thinking is still much appreciated, and using other people’s content to support your topic or add substance is a great way to show expertise.

4. Create a Schedule to Share Your Content

There are various ways to share your curated content. You can use a social media calendar to share curated content on social channels or share blog posts via your newsletter. Whichever channel you choose, make sure you are regular and consistent in your sharing. More regular sharing of content related to your brand helps keep you at the top of your target audience’s minds.

Here are actions you can take to share content more regularly:

• You can use a social media calendar to stay on schedule. Find curated content early and schedule those on your social channels beforehand.
• You can share curated content via your newsletter.
• You can write original blog posts from curated content to share with employees.
• You can use modern employee advocacy tools like Haiilo to make scheduling and sharing content easy. For example, PwC Luxembourg was able to motivate 73% of its employees to share at least once on their social networks, compared to a global average of 47%.

Haiilo’s easy-to-use interface and scheduling capabilities allow more employees to share relevant content about your brand in an organized and straightforward manner. With Haiilo’s platform, PwC Luxembourg was able to grow its brand ambassadors from 80 to 200 since it started its employee advocacy program.