One of the hot topics in content marketing is content curation. It can play a role in achieving various goals, depending on how, where and why you use it.

Whereas content marketing in the strict sense mainly revolves around identifying, creating and sharing content in order to meet business goals and what audiences want across the customer life cycle, content curation is about aggregating/discovering/gathering relevant content and then sharing or presenting it to audiences in a targeted and optimized way.

Content curation is not just sharing all kinds of content you stumble upon or source. It’s most of all about doing it in a smart and audience-centric way, by focusing on specific topics you want to curate content about. Some curation platforms even clearly revolve around community marketing purposes. There are many reasons why you might want to curate content. Unless you do it for the sake of sharing or for fun, content curation – when used – is part of an overall content marketing strategy. Let’s start with more details about what content curations is and what goals it can serve.

Below are some general success factors and effects of content curation.

Content curation provides context and convenience

Much online content may not be well explained and in some cases, is used incorrectly. And there is a lot of content. Content curators take the time and effort to filter, reword or explain the information to their audiences. In that sense, the aim of content curation is to make information more useful to audiences for specific reasons. It’s all about context and convenience.

Content curation does not overwhelm

The Internet has a great deal of informative content on various subjects, especially now. In fact, there is so much information and content that it often leads to information overload. On the other hand, curation reuses content on the internet to create content that will also be online (although content curation can also be used offline). However, content curation creates value by making the content better suited for the goals and target audiences.

Content curation can build authority

Content curators can build a more authoritative voice by locating and reformatting content in a way that it remains relevant to the readers. The authority arises from the fact that curators help people gain a better understanding of issues that confuse them. So, it’s not the act of content curation as such alone, it’s also about how you use curated content to inform, educate, entertain and engage target audiences.

Content curation: disconnected, connected and hybrid

Ideally content curation is integrated in an overall content marketing – and often social media marketing – approach. However, sometimes it makes sense to create a brand around curated content regarding a specific topic. You can also use it in a hybrid way, as an addition but somewhat disconnected from your own content. An example: this blog has a specific view and mission so we don’t cover everything about content marketing. However, we know what our target audiences value and use specific platforms and channels to link to other content as well. This can result in a specific channel, such as your Twitter account, becoming a medium as such. That’s not bad, the only challenge is that if it’s not an owned channel, such as a Twitter account, it doesn’t belong to you but to Twitter’s policy and you have no control over Twitter whatsoever.

Content curation and search engine optimization

Content curation, when well done, can positively impact search engine optimization. You can also embed curated content, within your own content, to make the experience of the audience more valuable. While content curation is often used for SEO purposes, we believe that it’s not the best thing to do (or better: not the main purpose to use it). What matters in search engine marketing is relevance and when using content curation just for SEO, you’ll end up hunting links instead of hunting value and that’s increasingly a bad idea. Curation means being open and sharing content of others. It’s an open Web.

There is much more to be said about content curation from a marketing goals and target audiences perspective and there are dozens of tactical tips we can share. Instead of summing them all up now, below you can find some links on the content curation topic. But let’s first look at some tools and platforms.