What Is Curated Content? Tips, Best Practices & Examples

What is curated content?

A content curator selects content to share on social media platforms. Curated content is hand-picked external content you can share on your blog or social media channels.

Curating content is more than simply sharing someone else’s post; it takes time to ensure you’re sharing the right content with your audience to boost your credibility and engagement.

In addition, curating content can help you save time and resources because you don’t have to create the content yourself. Instead, you find relevant content you can share on your own channels to keep your audience engaged.

How content curation works

Blogging takes a lot of time, and while you might share your blogs on social media, eventually, you might run out of content to share and need to create social media content. Luckily, curated content allows you to supplement your existing blog articles with content written and designed by others.

However, content curation isn’t as easy as it sounds. You can’t simply Google a topic, grab the link, and share it on your social media channels or blog. Instead, you must follow a content curation process, which consists of the following:

Finding relevant content

Content curation requires you to find high-quality content for your audience. The content you share online should be relevant to your followers, covering topics they’re interested in based on your industry or niche.

For example, suppose you’re an electric vehicle manufacturer. In that case, you might share articles written by trade or consumer magazines about government policies, innovations, and other popular topics, depending on your audience. In this case, your audience might be consumers, so consumer magazines may be best, but there are many sources online to choose from.

Organizing

Once you’ve found the content you want to share, it’s time to organize it. Some content is more timely than others. For example, an article about recent events should be posted as soon as possible to stay relevant.

Therefore, you should organize curated content by relevancy and include some of your content in the planning process. While curated content can supplement your content strategy, you shouldn’t rely on it entirely.

Scheduling

Once you’ve organized all your curated content by relevancy, you can schedule your posts in your CRM or social media tools.

Benefits of content curation

Content curation is an essential part of an overall content marketing strategy for many businesses that lack the resources to create their own content regularly. The benefits of content curation include the following:

Connecting with your audience

Your audience expects regular updates from your brand, and you can’t do that on social media or via your company blog without content. Content curation can help you connect with your audience by providing relevant and informational content that might interest them.

Saves money and time

Unfortunately, many brands don’t have the resources to create their own content. Content curation saves time and money, reducing a company’s need to hire more marketers to create content for social media or the company blog.

Maintains relevance

Your audience is always looking for relevant information. While social media is a valuable sales tool, you should not constantly sell to your audience; instead, you should provide them with resources where they can learn more about a particular topic.

Sharing curated content can also position you as a thought leader in your industry. Even though you didn’t write the content yourself, you can add a small blurb to the shared post to give your insight without creating a long article.

Engages with other companies

Content curation can help build relationships, allowing you to network. Curated content can be a great PR tool, allowing you to share a publication’s article with your own thoughts and tag them in the post.

After you’ve shared a post, you can reach out to the publication to let them know you’ve shared their article and begin a beneficial relationship with different journalists who cover your niche.

Content curation best practices

Content curation can help you connect with your audience and promote engagement, but it has to be done right. Now that you understand the importance of curated content and how it can help your business on social media, you can get started with a few of these tips:

Consider how much content is curated

You shouldn’t rely solely on curated content; it should supplement your content marketing strategy.

Therefore, if you post 5 times a week, only 1 of those posts should be curated from another source. Too much curated content can reduce your brand credibility because it makes you look like you don’t have your own content or opinions.

In addition, since curated content is not housed on your website, you’ll ultimately be sending traffic to another website, which won’t do must to boost your website traffic or sales.

Understand your audience

If you want to curate content the right way, you should know the types of content your audience wants to see from you. Of course, this is easy if you already create your own content and understand what gets the most clicks.

However, if you’ve just started curating content, you should research your audience to determine what content will perform best. For example, if you sell pet products directly to consumers, you may want to curate content from reputable publications consumers have heard of.

Only curate content from reputable sources

There’s a ton of information online, so it’s essential to filter potential content to ensure you’re only sharing content from reputable sources. Of course, if there are popular bloggers that are experts in the industry, you can share content from their websites and well-known publications.

Customize content

Once you have a link or post to share on your social media channels, you should take extra time to customize it. For example, you can add your own thoughts and viewpoints by writing a short blurb as the post text before sharing it with your audience. This will show your followers that you took the time to read and comment on the article while giving them an additional viewpoint to consider, ultimately positioning you as a thought leader in your industry.

Tag your sources

Tag your sources, including the publication, blogger, or journalist. Tagging the source can help you build relationships and credibility, which are both good for other marketing initiatives like public relations.

Schedule posts

You should always have a content calendar if you want to save time. Once you’ve selected your curated content, you can use a social media management tool to schedule posts at the right time to reach the most people.

A content calendar can help you save time because you’ll always know what you’re posting about on any given day, and it will help you better organize your topics to ensure you’re not creating duplicates or using too much curated content.

Measure results

Curated content might not work for every business, especially if your followers expect to hear directly from you and don’t usually click on links.

You should also consider the social media platform you’re using. For example, curated articles won’t perform as well on Instagram, a photo-based social media platform, compared to Facebook or LinkedIn. Still, you should always measure results to tell you which types of curated content perform best among your audience and on which platforms.

Engage with your audience

Curated content simplifies audience engagement while saving you time and money during the content creation process. Instead of relying only on content you create, you can find sources with articles, infographics, and other educational content that can delight your followers on social media. Of course, you should never rely entirely on curated content, but it can be a great tool to supplement your overarching social media marketing strategy.

Mailchimp makes it easy to post your curated content on social media by connecting your social media pages and creating and designing your posts from the dashboard. With our social media management tools, you can create the right messages to share with the right audience and understand data to measure what types of curated content work best. Want to learn how to create a winning content strategy? Read our content strategy guide.