Be honest. Don’t you wish creating fresh, hot new content every week was easier than it is?
I know I do.
No matter how many cool copywriting tricks you’ve got up your sleeve, when deadlines start breathing down your neck, no one is 100% immune from the dreaded blank page blues.
Looking for a way ease the pressure of having to constantly produce stellar content, in early 2012 a bunch of smart Internet folks came up with the idea of content curation. The basic idea of content curation is that, no matter who your audience is, there is already so much good, relevant content being produced daily.
These days, content curation is common practice now, and forms part of any professional content marketing plan. The problem is, there is most definitely a right way and a wrong way to do content creation.
The wrong way can end up making you look like a spambot, scraping random junk from the Internet and slapping it up for your audience. Not only is this a no-no according to Google, but you’ll trash the hard-earned trust you’ve built up with your readers.
So what should you do instead? Glad you asked…
How to Do Content Creation the Right Way
In the grand scheme of marketing, content curation is vital to any content campaign because it can help you get incredible content pieces to share with your audience, as well as helping you figure out new topic ideas.
Remember, when you curate content, you are only looking for content to gain inspiration from, not to copy. Use content curation as a way to inspire yourself and enhance your own individual content strategy for your clients.
Content Creation vs Curation: The Ideal Mix
A few years ago, the accepted wisdom was that the ideal ratio between created and curated content was 80/20, that is, 80% created content, and 20% curated content.
According to more up-to-date research, and depending on the industry, a mix of 65/35 (with original, created content still forming the larger proportion) seems to be a more acceptable ratio in 2017.
Convince&Convert even go further to show what it looks like to be a “curator,” “balanced” on social media, or the danger line of a “self-promoter,” very useful information for the content curator:
Keep in mind that, within this balance, your curation should be focused more on your social platforms than on your own blog, which is where only your original content should be featured. Your blog is your online real estate – why put someone else’s content there?
To produce that ideal mix, though, you’ll need some smart tools to help you.
The Top 17 Content Curation Tools for Smart Marketers
Here are some of the top content curation tools you can use to help boost your content starting today.
1. Trap.It
Trap.it pulls in relevant third-party content from all over the web, including industry research, insights and trends, which can be organized into topic-specific libraries for instant reference.
Trap.It is also an “intelligent” curation tool, which means the more content you curate the smarter it gets, so you’re never lost for inspiration. Best of all, you can distribute the curated content you’ve “trapped” across all social platforms to engage your audience without spending hours on the web.
2. Feedly
Feedly helps you to curate blog content that can be used as resources for future posts or give you great ideas for upcoming content. Feedly is also great for following authorities and influencers in your industry, so you can stay on top of the hottest conversations and create content based on the latest trending topics. It doesn’t pull images, but the lack of visuals doesn’t diminish the importance of this tool.
3. Pinterest
Like Feedly, Pinterest is great for keeping up with celebrities, pop culture icons and leaders in your industry. Depending on your niche, Pinterest is also fantastic for collecting useful “hacks”, tricks and tips you can build your content around. Save these ideas to boards on your account, and work with them to curate excellent content for you and your clients.
4. Quora
Quora is fast becoming the go-to platform for finding out what people want to know. You get expert, authoritative opinions and answers to questions ranging from what it feels like to be a CEO to how to apply to the best colleges, and almost everything in between. Quora is a gold mine for insightful perspectives on hot topics you can use as the basis for a wide range of content. Just set up an account, and then search your keywords to find excellent content to store away for future use. You can also set up your account to be notified about articles relevant to your field, so you can get more articles and interesting ideas in your inbox.
5. Scoop.it
Used by more than 2.5 million marketers, Scoop.it just might be a content marketer’s dream come true. This powerful curation platform allows you to search for content according to keyword, share curated content directly to your social channels, and embed everything you find on your page. What’s more, the platform also offers predictive insights and an accurate ROI measuring tool that helps you get the most from your curated content. At Express Writers, we love the CEO of Scoop.it, Guillaume Decugis! I’ve recorded a podcast on the Write Podcast with him talking how to fit curation into your content marketing strategy, and we even had him as a guest on our Twitter Chat #ContentWritingChat talking content curation principles.
6. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a smart marketer’s “pro tool” when it comes to content curation. BuzzSumo keeps you up to date with the latest trending topics in your industry by sending automated alerts every time new content in your industry is published. Use BuzzSumo to search for content by topic, and share it directly from a simple dashboard.
I absolutely love the “Content Research” tab, to research and interact with the people sharing our content, and to hunt down hot topics.
Ideal for the marketer who wants to streamline content curation and share better material, BuzzSumo is a simple, no-headache tool.
7. MyCurator for WordPress
This tool is perfect for those who use WordPress for their website and blog. MyCurator allows you to quickly and easily curate content, fetching relevant articles, videos, and other content from all over the web, with an option for automated posting to your site. There are also bulk curation tools for collecting multiple pieces of content for large or serial projects.
8. Twitter List
Using Twitter Lists can help you monitor content from influencers, news websites, and other relevant companies which can be resources for real-time marketing. Set up lists for different categories so you can check the conversations under a topic in an instant.
9. Learnist
Learnist lends an authoritative twist to content curation because it helps people learn from industry leaders and experts. You will be able to curate authority content, and even learn new information about your industry from the people who are driving it forward and making things happen. Learn how to manage your time from productivity experts, or how to make the perfect cappuccino from a top barista, all while collecting stellar content ideas!
10. Slideshare
While this tool doesn’t act like most of the other content curation tools I’ve mentioned, SlideShare does provide you with the chance to learn from others and share your knowledge. You can look through various Slideshares of those in your industry to gain new information and curate content, and you can share the best ideas with your audience.
11. Storify
Storify is an awesome visual tool that can help users create storyboards for their content campaigns by utilizing content curation. You can either be the one doing the creating, offering people content to curate, or you can look through the storyboards and curate content from others. In addition, you can also get a WordPress plugin for Storify.
12. List.ly
Whether it is a blog list post, a grocery list, or a simple to-do list, everyone has some sort of love for lists. They are great at helping you keep track of things, organizing information, and they are perfect when it comes to content curation.
List.ly helps you can gather your information together in useful lists, and which readers can then up-vote or down-vote each part. This can help you find content that will be more impactful, and which content you might want to stay away from. Again, just like with Storify, there is a handy WordPress plugin for List.ly.
13. ContentGems
This program gives you access to over 200,000 RSS feeds, which makes it easy to find and curate virtually any type of content you need. All you have to do is search your chosen keywords, and you can skim through several different resources, cherry-picking juicy content along the way.
14. Pocket
Pocket is a handy little app when you’re just getting started with your curation efforts. Pocket installs a button on your browser, so when you come across an interesting article, video, or image, you just hit the button and put it in your “pocket” for later. You can also access your content offline, so you can build your library while you browse and access it whenever you want later. A very welcome added bonus is that when you sign up to Pocket, you get daily emails showcasing the most “pocketed” content from around the web.
15. Triberr
Triberr is a great way to help connect with industry leaders and curate their content. The most valuable feature of this app is that you get access to groups based around a specific area of interest. In addition to engaging topic-specific content, you also get exposed to insider lingo, up-to-date info on what’s hot and what’s not in your niche, and interesting angles and opinions on your topic. You can find your area(s) and join the tribe to begin curating great content, and you can share that content when you find something useful.
I’ve actually had content clients walk in from my interactions on Triberr. There is real value in the audiences here!
16. Post Planner
This tool helps you to share your curated content on Facebook at some of the best times. It promises that it can help you get viral content by just spending ten minutes each day on the program.
It looks at your Facebook page and decides what dates, times, and content pieces will work best for you, giving you the maximum reach with your content and blogs. This can help boost Facebook engagement, and get those curated pieces out to your audience.
17. Curata
Curata is another intelligent content curation tool because it makes sure to find articles and content that meets your interests. It goes throughout blogs around the Internet and tailor makes content lists for you to look through. Curata gives you the chance to look over the curated content, annotate the pieces, and curate the best content for your industry needs. This tool is especially handy if you happen to be very busy – like all good content marketers always are!
4 Simple, Key Practices to Make Sure You’re Always Doing Content Curation Right
To ensure that your content curation helps rather than hurts your brand, follow these best practices:
1. Only publish content in your area of expertise
Anything else is irrelevant and will look to your readers like you’re just pushing out any content to populate your platforms. Also, this should go without saying, but I’ll say it: only publish content you’ve thoroughly read. You should know what you’re promoting before you hit that promote button.
2. Make it your own by adding commentary
If you’re going to curate content, take it the extra mile by personalizing the content with commentary, insights, or pulling quotes from curated content to develop your own unique content (with ample citations, of course). According to our podcast with curation expert, Guillaume Decugis, this is one of the primary tenants of good content curation!
3. Focus your content curation on social media channels
Curated content will perform better on social channels than it does on blog.
4. Use curated content for inspiration and conversation-starting
If you’re relying on curated content to populate your accounts, you might be better off hiring professional writers to help you create content than you will be to simply keep curating. Ideally, you want to rely on curated content less than you appreciate. Think of curated content as a source of inspiration that you can use to improve your own custom content rather than a crutch you need to keep your accounts functioning.
The Best Content Curation Tools Result in More Effective Curated Content
Content curation tools take a great deal of the grunt work out of curating content. In doing this, they also allow you to enhance your content strategy, gain inspiration from industry leaders, and shuck (just a bit of) the burden of content creation.
While content curation is an integral part of any good content strategy, it pays to put in the time and effort needed to do it well.
In addition to keeping your content relevant and unique, this will also ensure you stay far away from Google penalties and plagiarized material, which is great for you, your readers, and the authors from whom you’re curating content.
Still overwhelmed with curating excellent content? Our Strategists know how to plan out a month of content, including how to curate topics. Check out our Content Strategy services!
A constant content flow that has the power to keep you and your brand in the public eye is an invaluable asset. Nonetheless, the process of creating fresh, reader-oriented, 100% original content for different platforms demands a lot of time and money.
Successful content and social media marketing require the highest level of commitment and consistency, whereas you, as a budget-conscious small business owner, have the responsibility to manage your resources wisely and limit your spending without making any quality compromises.
This is where content curation comes into play, allowing you to increase your online visibility without breaking the bank.
What Is Content Curation and How Could It Help Me Grow My Business?
Content curation represents the act of identifying, collecting, organizing and displaying content that is relevant to a certain area of interest and a particular audience. According to an article published by Search Engine Journal, this concept refers to the process of discovering and using quality content pieces with a real substance, elaborated and published by high-authority sources.
You may be wondering: how could this strategy benefit my business? Truth be told, there are several benefits associated with content curation. First of all, this technique enables you to save time, money and energy that you would otherwise have to invest in content creation. Secondly, the almost overwhelming abundance of premium content launched by reputable sources allows you to select the best pieces based on the interests and expectations of your audience, and also according to your own mission, vision and goals. Thirdly, content curation is a social act by definition; therefore, it could represent a viable and extremely effective method to establish new partnerships with prominent players operating in your industry, make new contacts and rely on the type of writing that can give you the chance to reach a larger segment of public.
An example of curation is what we’ve been doing. The Great Content Roundup accrued over 200 shares in just a few days.
Content Creation vs. Content Curation: Which Tactic Works Best for Your Business?
An article published by Social Media Today reveals that content curation and content creation are two excellent methods that any company can use to fill its content pipeline. Both processes have their pros and cons and should be seen as the two halves of the same whole; not as two disparate strategies implemented to achieve a steady content flow.
4 Benefits of Content Curation
Cost-Efficiency. When you have sharable, world-class content at your fingertips, you can choose to curate your favorite pieces instead of crafting new ones from scratch.
Time-Efficiency. When you don’t have much time to create your own content, you can promote the most brilliant ideas introduced by reputable industry experts to give your readers the food for thought that they’re expecting to see on your blog/website/social media account.
The Chance to Build and Maintain New Connections. By consuming other people’s web content, you encourage the development of new potentially fruitful partnerships that could support your boldest marketing goals in the future.
The Opportunity to Help Your Readers Explore Various Perspectives on a Certain Topic. Content curation lets you introduce newsworthy facts from multiple perspectives, enabling your readers to form an educated opinion on a particular subject.
On the other hand, content creation also has its fair share of benefits, including the following ones.
4 Benefits of Content Creation
The Opportunity to Make Your Voice Heard Through Original Content. Your tone of voice, the originality of your ideas and the way in which you bond with your readers and encourage their feedback are the main elements that reflect your uniqueness. Through content creation you can celebrate your individuality and make sure that you’re not at risk of drowning in a sea of copycats.
The Ability to Demonstrate Your Skills and Knowledge, While Consolidating Your Position on Your Niche. Unique, highly researched content helps you talk like an expert and be identified as one by your audience.
The Chance to Craft, Publish and Promote Quality Content That Is Exclusively Yours. Words. By creating quality content you can boost your level of exposure. First of all, world-class writing encourages visitors to land on your page over and over again; secondly, the superior quality of your content pieces may stimulate other curators to showcase your masterpieces, implicitly spreading the word about your business.
A Deeper Connection with More Loyal Readers. Last but not least, generally speaking a constant content flow based on original pieces could improve your relationship with your readers and boost their loyalty, who will see you as an inspired creator, as opposed to a mere curator with no voice of his own.
[Tweet “Creation without #Curation is like Cake without Icing. #Content”]
5 Tips on How to Simplify and Optimize Your Content Curation Ritual
Both curation and creation can support your everyday marketing goals, allowing you to support the growth of your small business. The key is to maintain a solid balance between the percentage of curated content and original content that you publish on your website. In our article published on SiteProNews, we have listed the main steps that one should take to guide a healthy content curation strategy in the right direction. Here are five tips that you should apply to curate content like a pro.
Discover the Particularities of Your Audience (Including Its Area of Interest). What kind of subjects would make your readers tick? What type of content pieces should you actually curate to stay on the same page with your readers?
Make Sure Content Creation Is Just a Piece of Your Content Marketing Puzzle. These days, in order to maintain your competitiveness in any industry, you have to be more than an enthusiastic curator. Perfect your content crafting skills and let the whole world hear your unique story.
Add Value to Each Content Piece That You Curate. Make sure every single content piece that lands on your website/social media channel bares your creative imprint. Instead of copy pasting info coming from different high-authority sources, choose to filter the facts that you present through your own perspective.
Do Your Research. Find the best sources that could offer you the most relevant and engaging type of writing for your content curation strategy.
Use the Right Tools to Take Your Content Curation to the Next Level. Now you can make the most of an ample series of free and almost free curation tools, such as Curata, Scoop.it, Bundle Post and Storify, designed to discover, organize and share relevant, engaging content coming from trustworthy sources.
Creation and Curation: Getting the Best of Both Worlds
You are the content pieces that you distribute through different channels, so what does your writing actually say about you and your business? Moreover, what kind of favors should you expect from the content that you choose to publish on your website, blog and/or social media platforms? According to an article by Convince&Convert, you can measure the effectiveness of original content and curated content by taking a closer look at conversion rates and click rates.
According to the data provided by this source, posts linked to one or more third-party websites ensure up to 33% more clicks than the ones linking to owned websites. In other words, curation leaves content creation behind when it comes to counting clicks. Nonetheless, content creation appears to be the optimal strategy that you should employ if your goal is to drive conversions. Convince&Convert reveals that posts linking to your website can click-to-conversion rate up to 54% higher than the one displayed by posts that are linked to third-party websites. If you take a minute to think about it, this actually makes sense: your prospects need at least one good reason to become your clients. In this case, your original content is the main motive that stimulates them to make a purchase and interact with your brand in different other ways (subscribe to your newsletter, provide feedback, share your content on social networking websites and so on).
All in all, why choose between content curation and content creation when you can have both? Learn to see curated content as a breath of fresh air; turn it into your valuable source of inspiration and use it as a solid foundation for your upcoming content crafting efforts. Convince&Convert sheds some light on the secret recipe for success based on curation and creation: people who link their posts to their website anywhere from 25% to 50% of the time get the best results. However, this range may not always serve your best interest. A trial-and-error process is the best way to establish the optimal ratio between curated and original content. Measure your very own curation/creation efforts regularly and find out what type of content actually encourages your readers to respond to your calls to action in the most desirable manner.
Looking to jumpstart your content curation? Learn more here!
Content curation is a HOT topic and over the last year or so, as Internet content has grown, its popularity has trended drastically. For a lot of companies, understanding content curation lies at the heart of the future success of their online entrepreneurial enterprises. For others it provides a handy way to keep content coming in and keep the things that show up one’s blog fresh. Content curation is the art of gathering relevant ideas and content about a topic or niche and housing them in a simply navigated repository that gives users, at a glance, the usefulness and viability of the content as well as where the content can be located on the Internet.
To many bloggers, content curation represents the next logical step in the evolution of content production. There’s a saying that goes, “There is nothing that is new under the sun,” and as far as content creators have realized it’s a sad reality.
Coming up with fresh new ideas for content gets to be tedious and tiring as time goes by. Content curation provides an injection of fresh content while at the same time allowing for the establishment of backlinks to well-respected sites thereby increasing the authoritative value of your site (as well as your search ranking for certain keywords). Content curation is the direction that a business-minded site would move towards since it provides a lot of benefits with a minimum amount of drawbacks.
Important! Do Not Confuse Curation with Copying
Content curators collect information from sites and catalog them, then go through the catalog and pick out the ones that provide the best information then review their findings for the readers. It is an ongoing process and curators usually spend hours trawling the Internet looking for viable links that they can use in their work.
Although curators may extract certain parts of a bit of content to underscore the value of the entire work to their audience, they should NEVER copy content completely from another site. Curators are ethically minded people that aim to promote the useful information in sites that are not their own while giving value to their readers by condensing a tedious Internet search into a single page containing the most useful links for a particular niche.
Confusing curation with copying can lead to some serious fallout such as losing your page rank in Google for hosting duplicate content. As a curator you should be wary of finding yourself in such a position.
4 Ways To Plan Your Content Curation
Just like anything that has to do with a long-term business solution, you need a roadmap for your content curation. Developing a step-wise plan as to how to achieve the end result of a content curation site that content managers would be proud to operate is relatively simple. It can be broken down into three major sub-steps, each logically placed so as to enhance the step that comes after it. When planning your content curation you should be looking at doing these things in order:
Collect Content: Looking through the Internet to discover sites that best fit your audience interest and cataloging them with the appropriate utilities. This is the most important first step in order to create a database of valid links. These should be high-impact sites that cater to the basic needs of your audience. Arranging them by tags in an understandable format is where your journey into content curation begins.
Share the Best: Although your original pile of article links may number into the thousands, you’re going to have to do some reading and sifting. Content curation is a time-intensive job and the wider the niche you’re covering the more work is involved in getting your content curation to a point where it’s usable. In order to be considered seriously in your niche the quality of your shares should be very high based on their value to your readers.
Audit your Content: The feedback mechanism that separates good content curators from run-of-the-mill ones is auditing of your content. Your shared content may fall short in reaching your target audience and the only way you can figure that out is by doing regular audits and replacing the non-performing shares with those that are more likely to generate better leads. Audits also allow you to fix the technical aspects of your content (such as SEO details and keyword placement) so as to make the share more search engine friendly.
Schedule your Shares: Just like blogging, the aim with content curation is to ensure that you have fresh content regularly and on demand. To do so consistently, you should queue up your content shares so that they go live at regular intervals. These don’t need to be within any set time period, but consistent posting keeps your content curation site fresh and ensures that you don’t lose your search rank position through abandonment.
There are quite a number of online content production companies that offer content auditing and curation as separate packages or as a combination of both of these important aspects of running a site that is aiming to be an authority in the topic area. Because of the intensive nature of content curation, if you intend to go this route, hiring an external company to do your curation for you is definitely a good idea.
5 Ways Content Curation Can Generate Ideas
Curating usually inspires you to build on the content you have or to create brand new content. Just like a muse tends to awaken the creative spirit in an artist, so too does content curation give you a chance to explore different points of view for the same topic. You need to keep an open mind when putting together content via curation since it’s likely that sites that may not align with your point of view have some points that are just as valid as your own. Being objective is very important. Coming up with and curating new content ideas can be a relatively pain-free process, and may or may not include the following:
1) Utilizing your Experience. In many niches there are people who make up the user base that are very skilled in what they do. As a site seeking to be one of the authority sites for the niche, your content should incorporate the things you have discovered while writing for the niche. This can be done in any number of ways that attract both interest and feedback from the community. Coming up with new content using this method allows you to tap into a plethora of utilities such as:
User Generated Questions and Answers: In any community there will be a large amount of users that have back-and-forth discussions over topics of interest. The questions generated from these topics are very useful when coming up with ideas for new content. Ideally, when trawling the Internet for content links for curation, you should make note of these forum discussions as they provide great fuel for creating brand new content.
Opposing Points of View: Not all content you curate will be from the same point of view that you have. You are going to have to be objective in your choices and give air to the other side of the debate. Having other writers challenge your point of view is something that is as old as writing itself. Embracing this age-old tradition allows you to counter and rebut their arguments logically (or accept them if they have more evidence than you do to disprove them). This leads to creation of brand new content from older posts and can lead to quite a lot of community approval since it is seen as the mark of a great thinker to entertain ideas that do not officially fall within his or her world view.
Writing from Knowledge: Learning things from the Internet is something that many people depend upon. The most resourceful searchers tend to find information through their research. Content creation is about bringing value in the form of new information to your readers. Presenting information you have uncovered in your searching to them is probably the best motivation for creating new content that a writer can have. Your knowledge in the field is valuable to an everyday reader.
2) Personal Knowledge of the Field. This in itself can come from years of working in the field or from reading the pertinent literature and being able to apply it to the field in a satisfactory manner. This is usually garnered through a long-term interaction with the topic on a personal level. Although many bloggers have the benefit of writing from an isolated standpoint, there are few that really have a grasp of the actual, physical nuances of the topic they write on. Personal knowledge comes in very handy when presenting information to your audience that would be based on prior knowledge, but expands upon this by giving them a logical and legitimate stepping stone to your subject. A good example would be scientific news blogs. These impart knowledge to the layman by digesting information and applying their knowledge of the field itself to break down the overall results and jargon of a published work into an understandable post. Content curation aids in this process by giving you added exposure gained through reading the personal encounters of individuals in the field.
3) Review Existing Content from Other Users. This is at the heart of using curation to develop new content for your site. Ideally, a content curation site serves as an online museum where readers can explore the usefulness and details that a site may offer to them before going through the site itself. This saves time for users since it gives them only the most relevant sites to their interest In order to be considered a more valuable curation site, you should take time to review some of the shares that you have in a detailed format. This review doesn’t necessarily have to be exhaustive, but should give the reader a full idea of the content contained on the page so that when they go there, they already have an idea of what they’re liable to find. Content created in this way must be wary of giving too many excerpts from the main site since it could register as duplicate content, forcing search engines to penalize you for it.
4) Generate Titles based on the Most Popular Topics. Not all topics are equal, especially in certain fields. Understanding which topics are more popular than others gives you something to work with as far as getting a title and a direction to write in. Curation of sites will allow you to get a feel for the topics of discussion that work best in the community and those that don’t have so much interest. Remember that you have to keep your audience in mind both with your curation and your creation. Understanding what topics your audience values gives you a very good idea of what they would look for in created content. From there it’s just a matter of following up your research and condensing the points from multiple high-value articles into your own. Giving the source documents links within your writing also helps promote your site a source of traffic for the source articles and gives you good backlink karma with Google.
5) Think like your Readers. Your writing should reflect what your readers enjoy reading. This should be an obvious statement but there have been times in the past where writers have decided to opt for topics within their own interest alienating the readers that they need. Doing a content audit on your site will allow you to see the topics that perform below expected levels so that you can avoid those when creating new content. You can also spruce up those bits of old content or remove them altogether, making your site more in tune with what readers would expect from you. As a content curation device, auditing also allows you to get a feel for what works as far as interest generated by readers. Remember, once you start linking to other sites, it is very likely that they will start linking to yours as an authority site and drive traffic to your door. You have to cater for the influx of these readers while still maintaining your own voice.
Content Creation & You
Developing new content isn’t as easy as it once was. Even the ‘news’ is just a rehash of old events with new players. If you’re writing content, coming up with ideas is one of the hardest parts of the brainstorming process. There’s simply only so much you can say about a particular topic.
However, if you’re exploring the other things that have been written by authors on the topic, it’s not too hard to start collecting and critiquing their links, making your site an invaluable resource to users all around the community. These even help you come up with your own ideas and fuel your imagination.
When you get to that level, you’ll know that your foray into content curation was well worth it.
We’re starting a series of curated posts, called The Great Content Roundup.
Welcome to Week 1!
What to Expect?
In these “roundup” posts, we will summarize and link to anywhere from 5-15 posts in one blog post. These articles and pieces we link to will be the ones that we found held value and use for direct businesses in the areas of content marketing, SEO, and social media. These are posts you won’t want to miss!
For Week 1, I want to share some awesome resources with you on curation, since that’s exactly what we’re starting to do with this first post.
Welcome to Week 1 of the Great Content Roundup!
Our Topic: Content Curation
Content curation is becoming more and more a big topic online. As you may or may not know, we launched full content strategy services that include content curation in late 2014. Here are a few great guides that explain content curation in general, and a few more specific posts that offer intelligent insight, including a few of our own guest blogs.
Lastly, view our Google Hangout event that happened January 13, 2015 with Julia McCoy (our CEO) and the Scoop.It CEO, on content curation (we use their tool in our curating).
And, a bonus link…
BONUS:
Five Social Media Predictions for 2015 via HuffingtonPost, authored by Tania Yuki. In this brief but thorough piece, Tania explores how social media will change in 2015, including a focus on more personalization and building real relationships. People won’t be in “static buckets” anymore. Since content is all about real people, we totally agree with Tania! She also predicts that Snapchat will become more popular than ever.
On January 13, I held a Google Hangout on Air with the CEO of Scoop.it, where I interviewed him about Scoop.it and the value of content curation this year. Below is the video and full transcript. It was a very insightful chat. Enjoy!
Content Curation Interview with Guillaume Decugis Transcript
Julia: Hello everyone, I’m Julia McCoy, the CEO of Express Writers, a copywriting agency. I have with me today the CEO of Scoop.it. Can I ask you to pronounce your name, if you don’t mind?
Guillaume: Sure, so hi everyone, I’m Guillaume Decugis.
Julia: Guillaume. Did I say that right?
Guillaume: Yes!
Julia: Great! Awesome. So, to start this off, I just wanted to talk to you about your tool. I think it’s an excellent tool for content curation that is a huge need coming up this year. We’re just seeing so much content happen, and we need tools for content curation, to be able to sort this content, and to be able to share it. So, tell me a little about Scoop.it, how you built it, and how it helps businesses today.
Guillaume: Well, thanks for the praise. So Scoop.it was something we started and launched three years ago. We launched it because we realized that Web 2.0 was creating an opportunity and a pressure. The opportunity and the pressure is actually the same. The opportunity is we can become a media publisher, we can publish a lot of content. That’s what all those tools around Web 2.0 helped us do. It’s not just an opportunity, it became a pressure.
Now that everybody can publish content, if you do not, then you simply don’t exist.
Or if you publish bad content, you might hurt your brand. So we felt that pressure is going to be something that a lot of professionals, businesses, companies, big and small are going to have a tough time with. Because..
Not everybody is a content creator. It takes time, energy, talent, inspiration to create good content.
And so we felt a lot of people will be struggling with that. And there’s an alternative to create content, or complement. We like to talk about complement, which is content curation. We felt not everybody can become an awesome blogger, an awesome video producer. But, we believe that fundamentally all businesses, all professionals have expertise. When you’re good at what you’re doing, you’ve done that for a few years, you have expertise and you can apply that expertise to curate content, which means selecting great content that you feel is relevant to your field, and adding your own value, your own context: telling your audience why this was an awesome piece of content. And we felt that was much more accessible to professionals in general, and it is a great way to build your content strategy for your business. So that’s the background behind it.
Julia: That’s excellent! I agree with everything you said about getting content, and staying on the map with content. As you may or may not know, I developed some content strategizing products in our own company. We wanted to go beyond just creating content. So we looked into creating curation, and we were going to try to plan content, and show people how to find content. One of the tools I found was Scoop.it. I was so happy it was so simple to use, and I was researching maybe 20 different tools. Scoop.it was a key of how we find content.
How do you see it as answering a big need for curation coming up this year?
Guillaume: So, first of all, I love the fact you found Scoop.it simple, because that’s really I think the key to what we’ve been trying to do. We wanted to make it super simple.
Let’s clarify something: curation in itself is not simple. If you don’t have tools, it’s actually very complicated, and you can waste a lot of time trying to find great content.
You’ll have this experience of, like, I’ve been browsing the web for FOUR hours and I felt I achieved nothing. And so we felt we needed to combine a couple of things. First, a piece of technology that could automate your content monitoring. And let’s be clear: automation, we automate the discovery of content, we never automate publishing. So we empower our users to publish in their own name what they’ve selected, and we make it easy for them to find content instead of searching for it hours every day. In just a few minutes, you can have the most relevant content in your field, directly on your Scoop.it engine. So simplicity is at the core of what we’re trying to achieve.
I was asked by the Content Marketing Institute, what’s my prediction for 2015, and I think, you know, content marketing has been around for a few years. It’s maturing and it’s something that large companies have embraced. They’ve moved from traditional advertising, which is kind of old fashioned, to creating excellent content.
The company which I admire which is probably the pioneer of content marketing is Redbull. If you look at what Redbull has become, they’re not a soft drink company anymore. They’re a media company. They have this content pool with 50,000 pieces of content, they launched a man to space and broke the record of parachuting down to earth. They’ve done amazing stuff, they’ve done amazing content. But the thing is they’re a large company, and they’re making a bold bet of transforming their company into a media company. A lot of the small midsize companies have not been able to do this, because it takes resources, it takes a long term horizon that large companies have and small companies don’t have. So my prediction for 2015 was that content marketing is now going to become mainstream. It’s going to become something that millions of SMBs in the US or in the world are going to be able to embrace. And, I think curation is going to play a very important role there, because if you think of content marketing where a lot of people like to mix up creation and curation, and the large brands have resources. They can create a lot of content, they can have agencies work for them. But for more SMBs, they usually don’t have access to that, they usually don’t have a budget for that. So, curation is necessary for them to embrace content marketing, and that’s what we see coming in 2015, a lot of SMBs embracing content marketing through content creation and curation.
Julia: I totally agree with you. Everything you said is really insightful. I see that there is so much content on the web and it’s growing every day as you know, and it’s so important to curate and create to make your own mark.
Guillaume: Having a mix is really important. We’re not saying stop creating content; we’re saying if you have a day job, or if you’re not a natural born writer, it takes time and you should really focus on exceptional pieces of content. And we believe that curation forms creation. By curating you will spot the gaps in your field that nobody is writing about, like the things you’ve learned, you can tell. Instead of adding to the noise by creating another piece of content that’s already been written, you can use your curation abilities to say, I’ve shared some really good articles by other people, but nobody has been writing on that particular point, and I can share that and I can educate my audience. So, we’re strong believers in balance and there’s strong synergies in curation and creation.
Julia: Exactly. That’s something I’ve been blogging about in a few of my recent blogs, I talked about that exact idea. Guillaume: Yeah, I love your blog posts by the way, I’ve curated a few of those already. Really good.
Julia: Now about blogging, I also wanted to ask you how businesses can use Scoop.it to publish their own content. Tell me more about that. Guillaume: So our view is, the way we look at content and content strategy for businesses, we look at a couple of things. We think you should have a content hub, a place where all of your content, whether curated or created, can reside. A lot of businesses blog already, and if you have a blog you should make it your content hub. Scoop.it integrates with Wordpress, or Tumblr, so it’s very easy to consolidate everything in something that already exists, like your blog. So we look at you should have a content hub, which is where you’re going to drive your audience to, which is going to be a place where people can see all of your content that defines you.
We like to say you are the content you publish.
Whether it’s created or curated, and you can organize that content the way you want. It’s also going to be a place whether you can drive SEO content, where people will be able to discover you from search, not just from your social channels. You will also be able to convert. You know, we’re doing content strategy, content marketing because we think it’s fundamentally good for your business, so it should be a way to drive and generate leads, and convert people to either subscribe, or buy, or drive a sale. And you have to have your own face to do this. It could be a Wordpress blog, it could be another blog. And for those who don’t have a blog, we have a live publishing platform on Scoop.it so you can create pages with your created and curated content. You can use that as like a blogging platform.
So that’s one thing that’s your content hub; then you should think about all the distribution channels you could use, social media of course. Scoop.it is connected with all the social media channels, so in the same way you feed your blogs or your content hub on Scoop.it, you distribute that content to social media, to Facebook, LinkedIn, not just for files but for groups. We also integrate with the ability to create newsletters. Email has been under the radar for a few years because we say, ah, social media is the new way to distribute. We still believe that email is super important, super relevant, still in 2015. We integrate with Mailchimp to make it super easy to distribute by email. So, I like to think about creating a content hub wherever you feel affordable. But you should really own it. And with the premium version of Scoop.it, you can really make Scoop.it pages your own, you can really integrate with Wordpress, and distribution channels which should be social, SEO, email, to name a few ones.
Julia: Wow, it sounds like a really thorough platform. We’ve been using it to find content, but I don’t think we’ve been using all the features of being able to publish. So, instead of a social media competitor, it sounds like really you’re your own content hub.
Guillaume: Yes. You know, again, I think it’s an evolution of Scoop.it which is evolving. We’re actually about to launch a new version of the platform.
Julia: Yes, tell me about that.
Guillaume: That platform is really going to be reaching all around the needs of SMEs. And I think, as Scoop.it grew we evolved from being a tool to becoming a solution. And what do I mean by that? Very quickly, Scoop.it started as a discovery tool. The first users of Scoop.it liked it, that they could discover content very rapidly, and then share that content to their social handles. Then we’ve added the ability to create content hubs, or view existing content hubs on Wordpress. The solution people need is actually a combination of things. We think SMEs actually need a workflow. They don’t need just discovery, just distribution, just content hubs. They need a combination of that, of all things, and they need to be able to manage it. We have this new version coming in a couple of weeks, which is really about planning your content. Number one, having a calendar that gives you a full view of what is it you have plans for the next few days. Second, sourcing which is essentially the discovery part but enriched with a lot of admins features. So sourcing all of the content that feeds that planning, and then integrated with feeding a destination but also feeding distribution channels as we discussed, and also all of the analytics activity, did you get traffic, engagement, leads. So we’re packaging all of those things into a very neat solution that takes you through a content workflow with a 360 global approach.
Julia: Wow! So that’s really impressive. So that’s getting ready to launch next week?
Guillaume: Next week or the following week we’re getting ready. So in the next two weeks. Before the end of the month. Julia: That’s a good goal! That sounds really great. So, thank you for your time and going through all of that. It’s really great to see all the features of Scoop.it and what it can bring just coming up this year, because content is going to be a monster. And this tool can help businesses get control of it, and just not be average with content. And, you know, just do better than your industry competitor. So do you see a lot of growth coming up, do you anticipate that this year?
Guillaume: Do I see a lot of what, sorry?
Julia: Growth.
Guillaume: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think right now we’ve been seeing large companies embrace content marketing, and we’re used by large companies as well, as more and more are using collaborative features. We’ve been used by 1.5 million professionals primarily as a discovery social media tool, and so I think we’ve seen more and more SMBs embrace Scoop.it as part of everything. So we have been growing very fast, we’re closing our books and so I don’t know the final numbers yet, but we’ve been focusing on that for about 15 months now. We’ve grown in a year from 0 to 3,000 business and enterprise plans, and I think it’s going to accelerate throughout the year. I see a lot of, the story that you just told, businesses are now embracing content, they’re realizing it’s not just talk with peers on social media, they’re realizing you need to have that publishing capability in order to build your SEO, your inbound marketing, your inbound leads. I think that’s going to be an essential drive and an essential strategy to grow yourself. We’ve moved from SEM and emails to getting social media, trying to explore social media. I think those companies will understand that. It’s a powerful sales channel for us. The companies that do that will grow much faster than their competitors. And that’s going to happen this year.
Julia: That sounds really great. It’s just amazing how much content has grown in the past few years and how it’s changed so much.
Guillaume: Yes! And you know, another thought I would like to bring is, if you think that this whole change, driven again by Web 2.0, is about us becoming media publishers, as professionals or as businesses.
I would encourage you to look at what are the media outlets that really became rockstars in the past 5-10 years. It’s not the NY Times, it’s not the Washington Post. If you look at the history of media, it’s completely changed.
The media that created a lot of value and grew the fastest were the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Business Insider, Upworthy.
They don’t produce 100% of their content. They use a mix of their own content and curated content, or even some of them, like Upworthy, just do curation. They do awesome curation, which means that curation really can drive amazing traffic. So if you’re going to become as businesses, media, because Web 2.0 puts us in that corner and puts that pressure on us, we shouldn’t look at becoming media in the old-fashioned, twentieth-century way, like the NY Times 20 years ago, we should look at becoming media in the modern way like the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Upworthy. That’s using that mix of curation and creation, that makes it easy to scale and helps you become lean with content. We like to talk about lean content as a way to be efficient with your content strategy. And I think those media are a good example of that.
Julia: That’s a great point.
Just to wrap this up, I know you’ve mentioned a couple times just a mix of curation and creation. What do you recommend, knowing what you do, having gone through content, building Scoop.it, what do you see as a good schedule for curating (something that’s not original, but relatable to what you do) and then creating your own content? Would you say 50/50, like two blogs a week, and then a few curated?
Guillaume: So the way I like to define, for some people it will be 50/50, for others 80/20, the thing that I would encourage people to look at is what comes naturally. Focus your creation activity in creating really epic content, something that if you’re going to devote some time away from your business, away from your customers, away from your employees, you should really make it count. To me, that’s the rule. If you’re talking about a 3 people shop where the business owner has a lot of things, that could be once a month. If we’re talking about 200-people company which already has a marketing team, it could be blogging once a day (everybody publishes, you know, once a week, and if they’re a 5 people team, that’s once a day). But then, look at curation to fill in the gaps for everything else. And so I think it’s depending on,
The minute you start creating low quality content is where you should stop.
You should stop and say, well, instead of creating low quality content, create less content but curate more content. You will augment the quality of whatever your readers receive. To me that’s the signal, when you start realizing, ah! I’m pressuring myself too much, and I’m creating something I’m not really proud of. You’re better off spending that time curating. Julia: That’s a really great rule. I think anyone could take that rule and make it work.
Guillaume: Yeah, I mean that’s the rule I apply myself, whatever I feel uninspired, and I feel I’m going to force myself to blog, force myself to create something, maybe two hours later I’m going to go through content suggestions on Scoop.it, and I’ll find a great piece of content and I’m inspired, and suddenly I turn that into a mini blog post, using the publishing capabilities of the platform, and that’s so much better.
Because I’ve added to the discussion, instead of adding noise.
That’s been working a lot better for us as well, and our clients.
Julia: Yes, great rule. I would add nothing to it. Really good.
Thank you so much for your time today! This was a really insightful chat, and it was really good to talk.
Guillaume: Thank you, and if anybody has a question they want to throw out, my Twitter handle is @gdecugis. Feel free to tweet me, and I’m passionate about this discussion, so we are engaged.
Julia: Yes! That sounds great. We will have to probably schedule another one of these.
