Content Curation For Influence
As it sounds, content curation is the process of filtering and sorting through information prior to sharing it with your community, fans, and followers. Content curation is a hot topic in the marketing arena, and reflects a growing emphasis on finding, highlighting, and sharing good content.
There are many reasons you might want to curate content. You might implement a content curation strategy when you want to showcase ideas to your target audience. Many content marketers use content curation as a method for jumpstarting their own content creation process, as they might elaborate or respond to someone else’s content as a way to spark their own creativity.
There is a difference between content curation and simple content sharing.
The key hallmark, to my mind, that separates content curation from simple sharing is that content curation usually involves an addition of comments or more information from the one who is curating, where a simple share is just a repeat of what the original poster originally shared.
So, for example, it might be considered a straight share when I retweet someone on Twitter, or share their update on Facebook. Where a simple share becomes a form of content curation is when I add my own comments or thoughts to the retweet or share. Something like, “Very good article” or “I’m attending this event, I hope you will too.” These are one form of content curation, as they are highlighting an important event or piece of information, and adding commentary to it.
These types of additions serve primarily a social/relational function; you can think of these as “social sharing”. A more robust form of content curation occurs when you reference someone’s else’s blog post and add your own list of tips and strategies to it. This becomes a way of filtering information and presenting the best of it to your community. This approach places you in a thought leadership position.
This process, what I term filtering is a powerful influence building mechanism. As the rate of content production increases and people feel more and more overwhelmed by information, the most influential leaders will be the ones who filter best. Stated another way, you can gain some measure of influence and leadership over a community, simply by being a very strong filter of information specific to that community.
When people in the community see you as providing access and attention to relevant, good, and reliable information which improves their lives in some way, they will naturally begin to pay more attention to you.
While filtering is a viable way to build influence, an even better to become an influencer is to create and curate your own content. You can build your thought leadership by developing relevant, timely, unique and captivating content that serves your target audience. You can curate your own content periodically by reintroducing a valuable post, or reigniting the conversation around a particular topic. You might want to reignite a conversation around a topic in order to tie into holidays, events, or news. You might want to reignite a conversation to lay a foundation for a new product or service offering.
By selecting your best content and sharing it in new forms, or with updates, additions, and more information (think something like, “My New Year’s Resolutions, 10 months later”), you can recapture interest and give new life to content you’ve previously shared.
While curation seems to have initially begun as a way of rapidly creating new content, it also represents another way to build influence. By curating content, you are subtly allying yourself with the original content producer. By reintroducing content in a new form or as part of a new conversation, you are directing where attention and focus goes.
And, when you can direct attention and focus, you clearly have influence.
So, as a content producer, your goal is to create content that begs to be shared. Make it interesting. Have an opinion. Use graphs, images, infographics to make your point. Make your content captivating to your target market. Highlight what they absolutely must know and give them guidance on what is not that important.
Make it easy for them to access, and consume, perhaps by offering information in different formats (such as written, audio, and video.) Give them bullet points and highlights for what they need to know if they are in a hurry. The easier you make it for them to pay attention, the more likely they are to do so.
To the extent that you can help people interact with your information in a productive way, while guiding the conversation so your community benefits, you will be a curator with influence.
Dr. Rachna Jain is a content marketer and traffic generation specialist who helps her clients become more profitable and more popular online. Learn how you can get the right kind of attention to become liked and rich by requesting your own copy of the 7 Keys to Profitable Popularity at http://profitablepopularity.com/7-keys-ecourse
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