There is a growing emphasis in internet marketing to drive inbound traffic via content curation. New tools and new technologies are blossoming across the internet. There is even a content curation contest that recently launched. With so much ado about content curation – what is your business to think? Content used to be king – but now content curation is gaining many new internet marketing subjects who are driving gobs of inbound traffic.
What is Content Curation?
If you’ve been blogging for a while or have been active on Facebook, Twitter, or Google + you’ve probably already been curating content and didn’t know it. Content curation is simply finding and sharing relevant and valuable content with your target audience. Pinterest is perhaps the most notable and quickly growing social media network devoted to finding cool things and sharing them with others.
The Value of Content Curation
The indexed web contains at least 8.68 billion pages as of Sunday, 12 February, 2012 according to WorldWideWebSize.com. Depending on when you read this – that number has probably gone up. There is a ton of content out there and a good bit of it is just plain crap.
Content curators find the best of the web and share it with others. Google’s goal is to find and return search results that are relevant and have what they consider “authority” but even their vaunted search algorithm can be gamed. Human curation adds the invaluable ingredients of insight and judgement.
Why Businesses are Curating Content
The internet marketing case for content curation is strong. Companies and bloggers who find and share useful tools, resources and insightful blog posts with their audience make themselves invaluable to that audience. By becoming a good curator businesses can increase their followers, develop a reputation as a “thought leader,” increase customer engagement, develop valuable inbound links, and drive repeat traffic to their websites and blogs!
Content Curation Tools
Surely, you can take a curation approach in your existing social media profiles, though given the value of content curation as a marketing strategy there has been a growth in tools to make it easier to manage. Of course, there are some are high priced, enterprise level tools – but there are tools small businesses and hobby bloggers can afford.
- At $59 CurationSoft is affordable for small businesses
- Scoop.it is also an affordable content curation tool
- Curata, on the other hand, is enterprise level software
Develop a Content Curation Strategy and Become Invaluable to Your Target Audience
Matt About Business created this great tutorial called Become a Content Curator to Build Your Social Media Presence. He presents a sound content curation strategy you can implement today using CurationSoft, a newsletter, blog and social media to engage your audience and grow your business.
Got Mad Content Curation Skills?
If you are already an accomplished curator consider entering AtlanticBT’s Content Curation Contest. You could win fame and cool gadgets. But you have to act fast – the deadline to enter is February 26, 2012. If you don’t enter this year, practice up and enter next year!
Stephen Peacock is the owner of Peacock Creative Services, an 