10 Essential Tips for Content Curators
Content curation is an essentially contested subject. It means different things to a variety of people be they journalists, editors, bloggers or marketers.
Most people inadvertently already act as curators whenever they decide to post a link or video to their social networks to show their friends they have found great or topical content.
We think Rohit Bhargava's generic definition from 2009 is still valid today:
"Content Curation is a term that describes the act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue." ( we prefer to use topic or topics)
Based on our experience of working with hundreds of online publishers of all sizes, we would suggest the following essential tips for content curation.
1. Focus on your area of domain expertise or interests to gain a specific loyal audience.
2. Consider carefully the ratio of automation vs. manual elements in your content curation process as well as the optimal mix of curated and original content (if any). This obviously varies from topic to topic or subject.
3. Create a community for your visitors to connect and discuss the content you publish.
4. Find and collect the best content from across the web.
5. Use multimedia - images, video and good visual design to draw in visitors.
6. Maintain a continual and consistent flow of content.
7. Ensure you are adding value by selecting from quality sources and or providing a service.
8. Organise and present the content in an engaging and well structured manner.
9. Always remember that you are helping your audience to make sense of topical information by bringing together what is most important.
10. Give credit where it's due, respect Intellectual Property and always ensure you are in effect citing your sources of content.
As Jonathan Fields says in a piece called Is Content Curation the new Black in Psychology Today "one of the single most valuable roles you can play in this cataclysmic cacophony of content is to be the one who lends sanity to the process of finding and sharing only the cream of the crop."
There are still thousands of topics and subjects that are opportunities for content curators to step in and engage with audiences .
