How to Do Content Curation: Best Practice to Increase Impact

There are three two ways to handle content curation to help your existing content receive greater traction, and they can help generate awareness and engagement for your business.

For search engine ranking, it’s still important to continue to add fresh and relevant content to your website since Google still tends to look at the age of content on your website as a factor in their rankings – old information isn’t always so useful.  Curating your existing content can merge into this strategy – as you will see in the second level of content curation below.

The easiest way to curate your content is to continue sharing your existing content. As an example, I have a plugin on my website that will pull some of my past content, and re-share it on social media.

This can be a great way to keep your company and products or services top of mind for your clients and prospects, and can be effective when you do not have the ability to manually add new content to your social media pages on the frequency that would be most effective. There are also some software choices you can use to perform this similar function, such as Buffer or Hootsuite.

One of the big benefits is that your original content (and products or services) is kept in front of your audience automatically.

Re-sharing existing content is the first level of content curation

Once you are successfully re-sharing your existing content, you are likely ready to move onto the second level of content curation.

This is when you take existing content – such as an article, blog or social media post – and turn it into something else.  The second way to curate your existing content is by making new content out of the existing content – and there are two ways to do this – the more in-depth research-based method will provide you the best results.

Re-purposing existing content is the second level of content curation

There are several ways you can repurpose existing content, and it can become a relatively seamless part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

For this method, you take a piece of existing content and present it in a new way or format.  Some of the effective methods:

• Create a curate list of your own content – or a roundup list, with links to the pieces of content
• Repost excerpts from existing content (include a link to the original as well)
• Create slides from the information and post these on Slideshare
• Turn the information into a Kindle ebook that you offer for free
• Live stream the information in a live video on Facebook or other platforms
• Post as a video on YouTube or Vimeo
• Create an audio post and offer this as a Podcast or on Soundcloud

One of my most recent examples of this strategy is the Facebook Live video I published in December.  This video covered my strategy for developing a marketing calendar for the year, which helps keep your marketing strategy simple (and all in one place).  Marketing planning calendar Facebook Live video

This information was shared from a post I had written on the same subject: https://vickywu.us/let-technology-and-social-media-work-for-you/, although I have updated the marketing calendar planning template since the original post, and the video covered more of the template as well as discussing how I plan my year, quarter, month and week to actually implement the system.

Since I had saved the video, I also used the same video and posted it to YouTube: How To Plan 2018 Marketing – Free Template Marketing Planning Calendar.  YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, and feeds into Google search results, so it can be an effective place to host your videos (especially if you use our YouTube Guru-ization method to increase your video’s search engine optimization).

WordPress also plays nicely with YouTube videos, so I turned the video itself into a second blog post titled [VIDEO] How To Plan 2018 Plus Marketing Planning Calendar Template.  In my case, my blog feeds out to my social media and my email database, so this additional post received additional traction for the information on both of those platforms.

I am in the process of ripping the audio to share as a Podcast, and some of the other steps.  I have this type of curation built into my planning calendar, so that I never have to attempt to do all of the pieces I want at the same time.

A couple of big benefits come from this strategy.  First, you aren’t having to think up new content each time you need to post new information.  Second, different members of your audience are attracted by different things – some will like text, some will like images, some will like video, some will like audio.  By diversifying the type of content you produce, you increase the chance of appealing to more of your audience.

However, our content curation strategy does not need to end there.  Once you have this new re-purposing strategy under your belt, you want to do some research and dig into your data to push greater overall engagement.

Research of existing content is the third level of content curation

To achieve the biggest impact from re-purposing your own content, you need to look at your data.  You will find the best results by curating content that has a high engagement rate.

This strategy isn’t quite as easy if you are in the stage of initially growing your content, since you likely won’t have as many pieces of content to compare.  It can, however, be a great strategy for businesses that already have a good library of content and are able to track the content results.

There are a few easy ways to start this process, although you can go into much deeper research using some additional platforms that can assist you into segmenting the data you mine by demographics, and others that have the ability to pull all of this information into one report.  For example, Buffer Pro has some great insights with the subscription, which costs $99/month.  Hubspot can track everything you do within their platform, including blog and social media interaction, and drill down to specific client and client avatar information.

But to kick off your efforts, you can start with a few of the most obvious places – Google Analytics and your social media insights are two places you can obtain information at no cost.

First, pull a Google Analytics report showing your most visited content (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages).  I pull this information into a spreadsheet, because I’m going to merge it with the insights I pull from social media and then segment all of the information by post.  You can also use Acquisition > Social > Landing Pages to obtain some great insights.

Ideally, you will be looking at engagement rates, but for my initial pass-through I pull this report outlining how many visits the various content pages on my website saw for the past year.  I export it into Google Sheets, and start my project there.  I focus on which items had the most page views – but my focus may change as I pull engagement data from social media, since some topics may have additional engagement on those platforms which is not fully reflected in my Analytics report.  Finding the content that people are engaging with the most – either on my website or on social media – is my target.

I set some automatic formatting for the data in this sheet, highlighting general good bounce rates, good time on page, good page views, etc.  Your exact numbers will vary depending upon your industry and audience.

The next step I take is to visit the primary social media sites I have focused on for the past year, and pull insights from each.  I export these as separate tabs into the same spreadsheet, so I can use some formulas and cell references to help coordinate my data.  Keep in mind some platforms, such as Facebook, only allow you to export a limited timeframe, so hopefully this is something you do regularly – monthly or quarterly at least. Other platforms that can aggregate your data can provide longer timeframes.

Now that you have all of your data, find which posts – both blog posts and social media posts – had the most engagement.

Then, as you work through your content curation and repurposing strategy, focus first on those pieces of content that have already generated the most engagement across all platforms tracked.

As you move forward with your strategy, generate new ways of presenting this high-engagement content by re-purposing and even re-posting the content using the ideas outlined above and other methods you find effective.

If you have limited resource of time, it makes the most sense for you to concentrate your efforts first and foremost on those pieces of content that already have a great response from your audience.

Vicky Wu

Vicky is the CEO and Chief Creative Strategist of Vicky Wu Marketing. She draws from 30 years of experience at the CMO level, the CEO level, marketing for Fortune 500 companies and multi-million and multi-billion-dollar organizations, PLUS strategies learned helping startups and nonprofits with limited budgets … now focusing on providing SMBs with effective and efficient marketing strategies – giving them access to the same level of expertise as the really big guys with deep pockets, that they may not otherwise be able to access.