Lessons from the Best: What Techmeme Can Teach Us about Content Curation
Techmeme touts itself as the foremost source for tracking changes in technology and the evolution of technology. How do they do that? Curation—linking to the most relevant and important tech stories from around the web. Perhaps they explain best the necessity of curation in making them a top destination for tech news: “Spotlighting the writings of reporters, commentators, and industry players from across the media and industry landscape provides the only effective means of offering a comprehensive view. And by doing this well, we spare readers the impossible task of monitoring an abundance of news sites, tweets, and status updates.”
Here are some best practices in place on Techmeme that you might want to consider for your site:
1. Techmeme is a collection of links to the top tech articles. Create a site which is a collection of links to the top information on your field.
2. Make sure that you link to the most relevant and up to date articles in your field.
3. Make sure those articles are from the most reliable sources on your topic.
4. Organize for easy reading: Top news, sponsor posts, newest posts, who’s hiring [in your field], upcoming events [in your field].
5. Techmeme is not flashy, it’s functional. Make sure your site layout is simple and easy to follow.
6. Each featured link has a tweet, like, and link button so it can be easily shared with others who may return to the site to view the original link and become regular readers if they like what they see.
7. Each post is headed by author name/website source. In addition to being a helpful identifier of the source for each article, it also serves to create inbound links and generate more traffic.
8. Become the go-to destination for information on your field to make things simpler for your audience—they only need go to your site rather than scouring multiple sites across the web.
Now take some of these successfully tested and proven actions and apply them to your site. There are various tools out there that can help make curation easier, including content curation software like Lingospot.
