Content curation is a huge part of strong content marketing and social media marketing strategies – for a variety of reasons. And in this blog post, I’ll show you why exactly content curation is useful for your business and provide you with the tools needed to get you started.

Here’s why content curation is useful and should be an integral part of your content marketing strategy:

• Become a thought leader (and give people what they want/need): audiences are constantly looking for new content to read, see, hear, and so on. Sometimes, deliberately, other times, just browsing and seeing what pops up. One of the ways to stand out and be there with the right content, at the right time, is to curate quality content and share it with your audience, whether it be on social media, on your website or blog, or via email. This is one of the things that has helped me too in increasing my popularity and visibility on social platforms: sharing great content. Not just my own, but others’ as well.
• Offer a wider variety of content and save resources on creating new content: by using other people’s content as part of your strategy, you can cut down some on your own content creation. That’s not to say you should stop creating original content (definitely don’t – you have to create a mix of original and curated content to keep audiences interested), but that you won’t have to create new content as frequently.
• Engage and grow your audience: as I mentioned before, audiences are always on the lookout for great new content. If you provide it, it gives them a reason to follow you on social media, read your blog regularly, and engage with you.

How to use content curation to your advantage:

Share on social media

With content curation, you can make sure you’re constantly posting something new, even if it’s not an original piece of content. Make sure to insert your own comments when posting something, and don’t just post a link.

Why is that post interesting? Is there a quote that attracted your attention? Is it a controversial topic that you can share your opinion on?

This way, you’re giving people a reason to engage with you on social media, and not just filling your content schedule. This can be especially useful to small businesses that don’t have the budget for constant content creation.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Why content curation is useful for your business #contentcuration #content @wakelet ” quote=”Why content curation is useful for your business #contentcuration #content @wakelet “]

To keep evidence of all your published content

Content marketing campaigns usually involve a lot of content, most of it spread out across different websites and channels.

Use content curation to keep evidence of all this content in one place, for future reference. Plus, you can also use it to collect all content that mentions you or your business.

For research

The content being shared in your industry is like a window into the current trends happening in your niche.

Use content curation to collect relevant articles and media in order to use for your research; for example, use it to inform your content marketing strategy (i.e. to find out what your audience is currently reading/seeing/hearing, and what they want/need), to get ideas for new content and new blog posts.

Use internally

Did you find a really useful blog post that someone from your team could benefit from? Or maybe there’s been a huge development in your niche that your entire team needs to know about?

To save time and make sharing easier, curate content in one place and share it with your team – I’ll show you a tool that can do that in a bit.

To analyse your marketing campaigns

If you’ve had any marketing campaigns lately (influencer campaigns, awareness campaigns, and so on), use a content curation tool to collect all content related to the campaign – this will then help you evaluate your campaigns’ success.

Here’s what to use to help:

Wakelet

One of the content curation tools to stand out to me is Wakelet.

What it does is pretty straightforward: it helps you collect awesome content (articles, media of all kind, tweets, and so on), create collections of the content you find, and share it all with others:

This is your items page, where you can see all of your saved items – and add more.

The way the tool works is very easy:

• You add new content to your library, either by copying and pasting the link to the piece of content (the source really doesn’t matter – it can be a blog, website, social network, and so on) on the items page of your Wakelet account, or getting the Wakelet Chrome extension so that you can easily collect content to your account with a couple of clicks, and add the post to one of your collections (quite similar to pinning something from the web)

[clickToTweet tweet=”Why content curation is useful for your business #contentcuration #content @wakelet ” quote=”Why content curation is useful for your business #contentcuration #content @wakelet “]

• Build collections of your content: all the content you add to your Wakelet, can be quickly added to different collections which you can customize:

Give it a title, a description, add a link, change the layout of the content in your collection, and even write something in it. Plus, add a cover image to make it more compelling.

You can then make your collection private or public; private, for using internally, sharing content with your team, or saving and organising your own content in a safe place, and public, for sharing with your fans and followers, or with the Wakelet community.

For example, I’ve started a private internal collection to help me keep track of all my published guest posts:

This helps me keep track of everything I’ve published on other blogs, which is very useful considering I publish a lot of content online.

Another way I’m using Wakelet is to create collections of my favourite articles being shared on content marketing:

And this one is public so that I can share it with my audience, and even get people to follow it via Wakelet.

That’s another cool feature and one that makes the platform more social media-like. If you go to “explore” on your main page, you’ll then be able to explore all the different collections other people are creating and sharing:

What this means is that you can create all kinds of stories to share with your audience in a beautiful format.

For example, this person is using Wakelet to share their top book recommendations and also to invite people to tweet her their own book suggestions:

Or here, you have someone sharing their top resources for learning Spanish:

If you’re a consultant, for example, you could use Wakelet to share a similar collection, but only with educational articles and resources that are relevant to your target audience. This means that you’re providing them with real value and not just sharing a random blog post on your social media.

Back to Wakelet, though, you can then start following the accounts you like and save different collections to come back to them later.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Why content curation is useful for your business #contentcuration #content @wakelet ” quote=”Why content curation is useful for your business #contentcuration #content @wakelet “]

There are so many different ways that you can use this tool – these are just a few examples.

Some big companies are using Wakelet, too; for example, Channel 4 have used it to collect and share stories for the Cancer Awareness Campaign, #MYJADEIS; you can see all of the different collections here.  

Another example of how you can use Wakelet to your advantage comes from investment bank GP Bullhound:

They use it for all kinds of reasons, such as to collect all the latest GP Bullhound news and press releases, evidence of their research, pictures, videos, and articles from their events and so on.

You might notice that Wakelet is actually quite similar to Storify; since Storify is, unfortunately, shutting down soon (and already not accepting new accounts), Wakelet makes for an awesome alternative.

And best of all, it’s completely free to use (and as far as I know, there are no plans to ever introduce a fee to use it).

Conclusion

There’s no denying the value in a strong content curation strategy; what I love about Wakelet is that it allows you to take it a few steps further and really stand out.

You’re not just sharing an interesting article on Facebook; you’re actually creating an entire collection of related articles and media, all so that you can help solve the readers’ pain point (just like in the example I gave earlier with the business consultant).

I’ve only started using it recently, but I am loving it so far, and I can see so much potential for how businesses and entrepreneurs can use it to their advantage.

Have you tried Wakelet yet? Leave your comments below and please share ☺