15 Great Content Curation Examples You Can Learn From in 2022
15 Great Content Curation Examples You Can Learn From in 2022
Content is king. I think we can all agree on this. It’s also very time-consuming! I have lost track of how many days I’ve spent writing great content for the AdEspresso blog back when we started. It was worth it of course. But nowadays… I regret not doing more content curation to engage our audience and grow our community.
Don’t get me wrong. To grow your business you’ll need to produce your own (quality) content to generate SEO traffic and build brand awareness. Content curation is not a replacement for a solid content production strategy.
Information Overload + Keeping Oneself Updated
As you probably know already, the time it takes to follow and go through tens of web sites and blogs takes tangible time, and since most news sources publish or give coverage to more than one topic, one has to browse and scan through lots of useless content just for the sake of finding what is relevant to his specific interest.
Even in the case of power-users utilizing RSS feed readers, aggregators and filters, the amount of junk that they have to sift through daily is nothing but impressive. So much so, that those who do have the time, patience and skills to pick the gems from the ocean of tweets, social media posts and blog posts flooding our screens, do clearly stand out from the rest.
From whichever perspective you look at it, today it is next to impossible to have enough time to scour and scan all of the possible relevant news sources in a certain industry, and unless you start relying on intermediary human filters (the content curators) to aggregate, filter and hand-select the very best and most relevant news for your specific industry niche, you may as well give up on the idea of being on top of the news that are relevant to you.
- The information tsunami keeps growing daily,
- there are new blogs, social channels and news sources launching every day,
- there is an increasing amount of personal, serendipitous, but also distracting, colloquial content
- there is a growing amount of spam and marketing push masked as blog posts or press releases,
- on Twitter and other social media channels, there are a large number of unverified news and stories pointing to low-quality or even missing pages,
- it is hard for a newbie to distinguish a reliable, trustable source from a marketer or spammer, is a rare skill among users and too much low-quality content sifts through unless properly checked,
- titling and meta information is often misleading, ambiguous or just not clear enough,
- you can’t be there always. You can’t check the news 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
- unless you have some advanced skills it may be difficult for you to find new relevant sources of information and news from the ones you know, unless they are the ones to promote them
- relying always on the same sources tends to limit your view and awareness of other new ideas and opinions in your field of interest,
- news stories need to be contextualized — sometimes the relevance of a story for you can only be found by reading the story and extracting something else, than the main call, from it.
Given the above, how do you go about keeping yourself updated on your specific field of interest, without wasting a lot of time by having to follow too many blogs, feeds, Twitter channels and Facebook friends who are often not even talking about what you are specifically interested in?
Traditional newspapers curated news content from their associated news wire agencies, affiliated news bureaus and direct reporters, to create a bit-of-everything top-down/broadcast format designed to “inform” the largest number of people.
In the near future, when there will be hundreds of alternative specialty news sources curating tens of thousands of interest areas, it will be you, the reader, who will select your preferred topics and your trusted curator(s) to keep yourself informed.
Thus you will see readers gradually move away from superficial and generic information sources (as most traditional newspapers are) to individual curators or news hubs that curate specific topics and interests. The more specific, the better.
Tips on how to discover content, fast
With discovery being the bulk of the curation process, it’s okay if it feels like it’s taking more time than it should. Give yourself the time and space to discover. This is where the true content curation all-stars shine: They find the stories that no one else is finding. They guard their secret sources like family jewels and are always willing to spend the extra few minutes diving deeper into a rabbit hole in hopes that a new wonderland is in there.
1. Curate from curators – newsletters, communities, etc.
One of the biggest hidden secrets of curation superstars: They curate from curators. They subscribe to newsletters full of hand-picked links from peers and neighbors. They browse communities where stories are gathered and upvoted — crowdsourced curation, more or less. If you’re in the marketing space, newsletters like Teachable’s MakeChange and sites like Inbound.org are curation gold.
You have to have your own go-to places to find content that few others have found. These are your go-to sites — maybe an unknown blog, or a low-traffic section of a major news site. For instance, I adore the writing on Post Planner, and I love reading the New York Times’s tech blog. (Whoops, there go my secrets.)
To discover places like these, it helps to keep an open mind for curation when clicking through newsletter links or community upvotes. Do the sites themselves seem to resonate with what you’re wanting to find? Here are some questions to ask:
The bookmarks hack: This one’s a bit old school but super lo-fi and simple. Once you’ve found a handful of go-to content sources, star them all with a bookmark in your browser, and organize them into a folder. Then each day, start your curation by going to your bookmarks, right-clicking the folder, and opening all the sites at once. It’ll look like this:
2. Have a list of 25 (maximum!) go-to content sources
While you’re building out your Top 25, make sure to keep it at no more than 25. Yes, there may be more than 25 great sites out there, but remember that your ultimate goal with discover is finding the best, original stuff — and your secondary goal is speed and efficiency.
If you have more than 25 sites, you’ll be too busy filtering and hunting. Besides, if your list is more than 25, chances are they aren’t all sites that are original to your discovery. Other curators are probably curating them, in which case you can curate those curators.
3. Follow interesting people and make it easy to see what they share
One way to find them is with a hashtag search. If you have a particular keyword or two that is central to your brand or area of expertise, look for people sharing content with that keyword. Sort by most followers if you can.
Another way to do it is to see who is sharing the articles that you think are pretty great. If someone else has found your secret best stuff, then they probably are a good one to follow. To do this …
And if all else fails, you can try following people with a similar job title or from particular companies you admire or compete with. This’ll make sure that you’re staying on top of the stories that are relevant to people like you.
Of course, following all these folks is one thing. Being able to see their content in the stream of all content is another. You can do the bookmark hack and travel directly to their feeds every day (not a bad idea). You can try a tool like Nuzzel, which emails you a digest of what your Twitter friends and Facebook friends have shared the past 24 hours (ranked by virality).
The fake profile hack: Create a new profile for yourself on Facebook or Twitter by entering a new email address. If you’re a Gmail user, you can create a new email from scratch by adding “+” to your current email (e.g., [email protected]). Then follow your interesting folks from this fake account, and log in with the fake account in a separate Chrome profile for easy switching.
Make something new from something you already created
Jodi Harris is CMI’s master of content curation. Jodi regularly creates fresh articles by combining insights and examples from her (and other CMI writers’) earlier works. For example, her recent article 9 Visual Tips and Examples From Creative Brands and Experts includes tips from published pieces by Jodi and other CMI contributors. The image below shows one such tip, Consider the story – not just the visuals, which includes a point made by Robert Rose in a different article and related video.
Takeaway: You likely have created a lot of content in various forms on similar broad topics. Think about how to pull together the most salient points from several to craft an original piece. You also can mix up formats. For example, you could curate information from several articles into a single podcast episode.
Resources:
https://divbyzero.com/blog/content-curation-examples/
https://medium.com/content-curation-official-guide/what-is-content-curation-84212256e84
https://buffer.com/library/content-curation/
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/how-to-curate-content/