Note: This is Part 1 of our series on content curation. You will find links to Part 2 at the bottom of this post.

Content curation, when done right, is a great way to drive traffic and also build brand awareness.

We have recently implemented a successful content curation strategy and process for one of our other businesses and we are so pleased with the results and efficiency of the process, we want to now implement it as part of our marketing mix for Feed140.

Because we will be implementing the process from scratch, we figured it would be a good opportunity to share our strategy and processes with you as a case study blog series. Through this series, you can follow along, step-by-step, and put some or all of the same processes in place as part of your marketing mix. We know it works great for us, and you will love the results you get as well.

Quick Summary

If you are in a hurry, here is the condensed version. You can also view the SlideShare presentation for a quick overview. For details, scroll down to the rest of the post. You can also download the worksheet to help with the planning and delegation process.

Content Curation Definition

Content curation means finding, reviewing and sharing content from 3rd Party sources — sources other than your own original content.

Strategic Goals

Generate traffic (direct and search)
Build brand awareness and authority
Grow your social network audiences
Improve social network presence, attention, and interaction
Maximize return on time invested in content marketing

Key Points

Consistently-Good Content Is Rewarded with Attention and Clicks
It’s All About The Information Needs of Your Audience
Quality is Important — Add Value in The Curation Process
Focus on a Specific Topic or Set of Topics
Curated Blog Posts Create a Vibrant Foundation of Content
Choose the Right Keywords

Tasks for Part 1

Commit to implementing an effective and sustainable content curation process
Assign a Curator
Choose your topic, keywords and hashtags
Set up your Feed140 account

Click here to download the PDF worksheet for completing the steps in Part 1

If you would like a quick overview before reading the details, view the SlideShare presentation.

Details

What is Content Curation?

Content curation means finding, reviewing and sharing content from 3rd Party sources — sources other than your own original content. Through the process of curation you provide a service to your audience by helping them find content that they are interested in. In practice, it means finding and sharing blog posts, news articles, research publications, YouTube videos, and other content that your followers find interesting.

There are a few fundamentals that are really not optional if you are going to market a business online, and none more fundamental than consistently providing content to your audience through your blog and social networks. You need to have a Twitter account, Facebook page, and blog — at least — and those platforms need to be fed with a steady stream of content. Content curation is a great way to establish a reliable base of content in these places.

content curation

Before We Start Building, Let’s Talk Strategy

The two primary goals of a content curation strategy are to generate traffic and build brand awareness. These two things serve as the foundation of your online marketing success. Most people focus exclusively on getting traffic and don’t understand branding as a goal. Sharing good quality content on a consistent basis over time does a lot to increase brand awareness. After you implement a consistent content curation process, you will start to hear “I see you everywhere” on a consistent basis from your customers, competition, partners and suppliers.

There is a lot of strategic value in developing a good process for leveraging other people’s content. Perhaps most importantly, it saves a lot of time in the content curation process. You always need to create your own original content, but through curation, you can also leverage the content other people are creating and save a lot of time in the process.

From a management perspective, the entire process is much easier to delegate than original content creation. Anyone who writes well and has a passion for learning can be trained to be a great curator. And the real beauty of the process is that your curator will be so immersed in your topic area, both from a reading and writing standpoint, that she will have an excellent foundation for creating original content. Content Curator is a great entry-level position for a marketing assistant.

Strategic goals of content curation:

Generate traffic (direct and search)
Build brand awareness and authority
Grow your social network audiences
Improve social network presence, attention, and interaction
Maximize return on time and resources invested in content marketing
Use Hashtags to Reach and Expand Your Audience

Consistently-Good Content Is Rewarded with Attention and Clicks

When you share good content on a consistent basis, you are training your followers to click on your links and get rewarded with content that they value and want to share.

Building a responsive audience is critical to the success of the promotional campaigns you run on your social networks now and in the future.

It’s All About The Information Needs of Your Audience

To be truly successful, your primary focus must be on serving your audience. What information do they need and want? Where can you add value to their social marketing experience?

For the Feed140 content curation project, we are focused on social network marketers — our audience consists of anyone that is interested in using social networks as part of their marketing mix.

Focus on a Specific Topic or Set of Topics

When choosing content to curate, make sure that you focus on a specific topic area or set of related topics. Make sure your topic fits the needs and wants of your target audience, and that your choice of topic is not too broad. The information you share should enhance your brand and authority on a given topic area.

For the Feed140 content curation project, these are our topics…

Social marketing strategies and tactics

Quality is Important – Add Value in The Curation Process

As a ‘curator’ you add value through review and commentary. Review every content item to find the best available content for your audience. Take a time to say something about the content you share and give context to your readers.

For the Feed140 content curation project, we are investing in quality by dedicating a member of our marketing team, Alex, to the task of content curation. Alex has experience in content curation and continually gets better as time and experience accumulate.

In future posts, we will show you exactly what process Alex uses to find and share the best, and freshest content.

You can do it yourself, theoretically, but we highly recommend utilizing an assistant whose long-term daily responsibility is content curation.

Curated Blog Posts Create a Vibrant Foundation of Content

Leverage curated content by using it to create a constant stream of relevant content for your blog through individual posts that summarize and/or provide commentary on the curated content item and link to it as the original source. Of course blog content is always important and useful, the more keyword-specific content you have on your blog, the more free traffic you will get from Google and other search engines. A vibrant, active blog is also a cornerstone of a good online brand and essential for maximizing social marketing results.

After all, if you are going to be a source of content for your audience, a lot of that content should come from your blog as well as 3rd parties. Curated posts are a great way to generate the blog content by leveraging the content already being created by others.

Make sure you give credit where credit is due and provide links to the original source. For content curation to work best, the original content creators should benefit as well.

For the Feed140 content curation project, we will create 3 posts per weekday from curated content. Admittedly, that’s a brisk pace, be we are in a fast moving market and we like the results we have seen so far from this kind of high-volume blog content approach.

As part of this blog series and case study, we will dedicate a full post to showing you exactly how we crank out great content in our curation process. With a little practice and experience, anyone can do it.

We also use the Yoast SEO plugin to carefully optimize each post for targeted keywords.

The strategy can work, however with as low as a weekly frequency for blog posts so choose a frequency that works for you.

Choose the Right Keywords

Selecting the right keyword for your curated content is a vital part of traffic generation. Use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Jaaxy to conduct keyword analysis. Check out the particular keyword’s average searches per month, estimated traffic, level of competition, and SEO and topical fit. I other words, you want high-volume, low-competition keywords that fit your topic and search engine optimization goals. Make sure every aspect is in your favor.

For the Feed140 content curation project, we use Jaxxy pro to find the best keywords to use to optimize our blog posts. We start with the general topic of the item we are curating and use the research tool to find keywords that have low competition and high traffic. There are other tools available, this is just the one we use.

Use Hashtags to Reach and Expand Your Audience

Hashtags not only help you reach your target audience, but they also can create additional shares, user impressions, and more followers. The more popular the hashtag is, the more opportunity it represents for you. One tool that you can use to help find great hashtags is RiteTag. This automated software (which has a good free version) gives you a detailed analysis (average number of clicks on links, and average number of re-tweets, average number of favorites) on specific hashtags.

For the Feed140 content curation project, we used RiteTag to select these hastags to start with…

#socialmedia

#marketing

#contentmarketing

We will add to the list as we go.

The video below shows an introduction RiteTag and the basics of using it.

Your Tasks For This Week

Like anything worthwhile, it takes focus and commitment to fully-implement a content curation strategy. It is not difficult to do this process, but it does take effort and a bit of discipline to make it an organizational habit.

We have broken everything down into simple tasks for you, so all you need to do is follow along. Each week we’ll give you specific tasks to do that can easily be accomplished within a week. This will take some work on your part, but we will give you all the right tasks in the right order.

Make the commitment

Unless you already have a steady stream of good content going through your Blog, and Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks, you need to do this. We will make it as efficient as possible, but you need to commit to the project and do the steps. If you do, you will end up with an enduring, sustainable process in place that requires very little management time and guarantees that you will never have an empty blog or social stream again.

Assign a Curator

This is probably the number one most important element of this process. Someone on your staff needs to have the daily or weekly responsibility of curating content. The time commitment can be as low as 15-30 minutes per day or 1-2 hours per week. You will be most successful with a daily curation frequency and a high volume of content, but the process can be done once or a few times per week.

If you are the owner or manager of your business we highly recommend that you delegate this process to an assistant. If you don’t have an assistant, this is a great time to get one and an excellent project to start them on. Talented virtual assistants that specialize in social marketing are abundantly available as are local workers you can add to your staff. We are going for sustainable and scalable here, and that does not usually mean that the CEO/President should be responsible, no matter how small you are.

Choose your topic, keywords and hashtags

Keep it simple at first. There is, of course an endless list of keywords you could target, but identify a short list to start with. Same with hashtags, you can expand as you go, but get at least a few good ones into a short list.

Set up your Feed140 account

You are going to need a Feed140 account to do the remaining steps, so this week you will create your account and connect it to your Twitter and/or Facebook accounts. You can do all of the steps with a free basic account but it will be a lot easier and effective if you have a pro or expert account so we highly recommend that you take advantage of upgrade offer you will see during registration. That is the most economical way to upgrade and you will appreciate the extra features as you continue through this series.

Create a Feed140 account here…