When It Comes To Content, Creating Beats Curating

our content is king. The content you share online ultimately determines your social media success. If you aren't sharing relevant, engaging content with your fans and followers you aren't supplying value or giving your audience a reason to connect with you online. Good content is the backbone of any social media strategy, and it is impossible to excel in the social sphere without it. So where does good content come from? There are two options: you create it, or you curate it.

Content is the currency of the social web, and creating good, original content is always the best way to go. However, creating valuable and compelling content may present a challenge for many businesses. Therefore, more and more brands are trying to establish themselves through content curation - rather than creation.

Marketing expert Rohit Bhargava defines a content curator as:"someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online."

According to a recent eMarketer report, 85% of marketers curate content in order to establish thought leadership. However, while content curation is a good way of supplying your online audiences with relevant content, sharing someone else's content does not make you a thought leader.

Time is money, and since creating good content takes a lot more time than curating it, many businesses and marketers are sharing curated content and confusing the resulted attention with thought leadership. There are billions of content pieces shared on the Internet daily, and sifting through the noise to find the "needle in the haystack" can be difficult and superfluous https://yoo.rs/. Therefore, content curators are valued for what they discover and share - that's it. They are not valued for their own perspectives on a subject matter, and thus cannot be considered thought leaders.

According to "Thought Leadership Marketing is an Oxymoron" there are three key tenants of thought leadership. They are as follows: thought leadership is recognized, thought leadership is expansive, thought leadership is pushing boundaries.

Content curation, though valuable, is not a marketing shortcut. Your prospects connect with you online because they want to learn more about you. They want to know your views on a certain industry. However, when you simply curate the content of other's your audiences doesn't learn anything about you, your brand, or your thinking. Curating content doesn't set you apart, because everyone else is doing the same thing. If you want to stand out and reach your audience you need to create content - not just curate it.

In the early 2000's, there was a huge lack of content on the Internet. Since then, many media outlets, small businesses and people with knowledge in a particular subject matter, have added lots of content by means of websites, blogs, videos and other means. When someone goes online to search for information now, there is way too much information for them to process and make use of effectively. In this day and age of distractions and lack of time we have a great opportunity to be aggregators of information.

Content Curation, is the process of summarizing information from many sources, into bite sized, actionable content, while still giving the original content producers attribution by mentioning the name of the original authors and placing links to the original source.

What Content Curation is NOT, is copying and pasting portions of articles. This is illegal by international copyright laws. So be aware of this, and do the right thing. There is no place, in my opinion, for rip off artists in this industry, and with advanced technology that is available now, it's easy for the copyright holders to easily track such people and either warn and send a take-down notice, or even sue them.

When curating content, be sure to add value by adding your opinion and pointing people to other fantastic resources that they can check out.

The delivery mechanism for this need not be just articles. There is a wide array of media that can be used to deliver the content effectively. Some of the options are videos on YouTube or Vimeo, podcasts on your website or itunes, blog posts, short PDF reports, on Facebook, Google+, etc.

There are 2 immediate benefits of doing content curation.

1. Expert Positioning:

When you curate good quality content on a regular basis and add value to is with your own twist, you slowly start positioning yourself as an expert in the eyes of your audience. There is a natural process of people reading your work, gaining value from it, and then promoting your content to their friends and networks. This then acts as a leverage point to motivate you to produce more quality content and continue to add value and continue to position yourself as an expert in that specific area. You need to limit, especially in the beginning, your content to a very specific area. Once you're seen as a go-to-expert in that area, you can use the opportunity to engage with your audience, and find out their needs, and provide more valuable content to cover those areas as well.

2. Gaining more knowledge:

Well, this is an obvious benefit. Look at it this way, if you read about goal setting and achieving from 10 books, 20 blog posts and 10 videos, over a period of a month to curate content and create your own, wouldn't you learn a lot of different ways of doing the process and the benefits? Wouldn't that give you the opportunity to try some of it and see what works for you and put you in a position to give an educated opinion? Would you, by the end of that time period of 30 days, have more knowledge about goal setting and achieving than 60 -80% of the general population? I bet you would. So not only are you being an expert in the eyes of your followers, but are learning and growing yourself.

Content curation has been happening for a long time, in various forms. If you read 10 - 20 books on any particular, specific subject, you will see how the core ideas of the books are pretty similar, and most times, the newer books have the older ones as part of their citation. There is nothing wrong in using this method to position yourself as an expert. But always remember to acknowledge and give credit where it is due.