What is content curation? 

Even the most committed wordsmith is likely to find keeping up with audience appetite for content a huge ask. Whether you’re running an e-commerce website or a business with a brochure style web design, finding the time and inspiration to craft compelling, on-topic, unique, relevant, well-researched content at the kind of volume your visitors want is often an impossible task.

Add to this the always on mentality of social media and your once or twice a day posting could start to look a little lacklustre. Even then, if you do restrict yourself to one post per day, it’s very hard to generate enough content to keep your channels active without resorting to a social media cardinal sin – a never ending stream of sales messages and buy from us updates.So what’s the answer? If you’re worried that you aren’t creating enough content for your blog, simply can’t keep up with demand (and remember that meaningful brands are expected to create content ) or find it hard to generate interesting social media posts, content curation is the answer.Many brands are put off from content curation because it either sounds complicated or, they are concerned about sharing content that isn’t theirs – and thereby potentially losing traffic or sending visitors elsewhere. This is a common misconception but one that you don’t need to worry about.At its essence, content curation is very simple. You simply seek out a collection of content from other sources and then share this handpicked content with your audience. You’ll also add your own thoughts or additions to that content to put a personal twist on it and give a little added value to your readers. Simple, right?There are lots of other great benefits to content curation over and above it being a great way to keep on top of your content and social media posting targets: 1. It helps you craft an impression of being an expert You don’t need to have personally written every word of the content you share for you to appear to be an expert in your field. By handpicking useful, relevant and interesting pieces and adding your opinion, thoughts or impressions, you immediately appear to be more knowledgeable about your industry and come across as having your finger on the pulse of your area of expertise. 2. It helps you to connect with others Sharing content from other news sources, brands or influencers helps you to develop a connection with them. Often, this can lead to other things – such as guest blog opportunities, invitations to contribute or likes, shares and retweets.
3. It saves time Curating content takes time of course but it’s not as time consuming as creating your own content from scratch. This means you get the convenience of a piece of content plus claw back some time to work on your own pieces even while your channels stay updated.