Content Curation Organizes Sources Around a Common Theme
By: Kathy Berman
Tags: Writing, Writing Tips From Writers, Content Strategy, Content Creation, Content Writing

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash

“Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme.” Beth Kanter

What is Content Curation?

I have been a content curator on all 6 of my Wordpress blogs since 2006. I love to read, to share what I read, and to organize what I read. This is content curation. I use RSS feeds to follow many sources to grab the content I use for each of my posts. Each post has one main theme so they must all have the same theme. I use 3 sources for each story.

From “What is Content Curation?”:

“Content Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that surrounds specific subject matter. Though it is still considered a “buzz word” by many in the content world, content curation is now becoming a marketing staple for many companies with a successful online presence.

Unlike content marketing, content curation does not include generating content, but instead, amassing content from a variety of sources, and delivering it in an organized fashion. For instance, a content curator is not necessarily responsible for creating new content, but instead, for finding relevant content pertaining to a specific category and funneling this information to readers in a mash-up style.”

Save and Use Only Valuable Content

From “The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation (With Examples!)”:

“Overwhelming as it seems when you start out, sourcing great content is not hard, especially with so many automated tools at your fingertips.

RSS feed readers are the first go-to source of content for curators. Using tools such as Flipboard allows you to search by URL or topic and collate your content into categories.

Social media is the next main source, and again you have a myriad of tools at your disposal. For example, Social Searcher is a free platform that allows you to search by hashtags or topics and brings up every post published on the major social media sites.

Or you can create a Twitter list to collate the accounts you follow.

Find the right tools from the list below for your content sourcing and collating purposes, and remember to stay focused when you go searching. You can easily disappear down a rabbit warren of irrelevant information.

And finally, don’t forget your own blog or social media pages as a source of content.

Select posts that have done well in the past and may resonate with a new audience. Or think about repurposing or updating an old post. Here’s a great example of curating your content from Copyblogger.”

What Tools Help With Content Curation?

From “13 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs”:

“If you’re thinking, “Yeah, I occasionally share a relevant post with my customers when I find one,” congratulations — you’re curating content. Unfortunately, you’re not doing so on a sustainable scale that makes you a trusted source.

But don’t worry — there are better ways to curate content for beginners that are completely free. Here are three simple sources of information to help you start getting in the habit of curating content, without being overwhelmed by complex tools, subscription fees or convoluted dashboards.”

And, finally, from Robin Good:

“Curating content takes significant time, compared to typical blog or article writing, because it requires the author to find, vet/verify, organize high quality information from multiple sources, and to add value and perspective to it before deciding how to present it in ways that make more effective.

Curation is a complex and challenging activity.

It requires competence / experience in the field being curated, as well as great familiarity with the players, the issues, the trends and the tools that define its space. To curate requires above average skills (research, vetting, writing, presenting) and strong knowledge of the matter at hand.” Robin Good