Many marketers lack the time, staff, and budget to consistently publish original content.

As a result, content curation can help fill this content gap of providing consistent content to your audience.

In fact, content curation is one of the seven Cs of a successful social media strategy.

What is the definition of content curation?

Content curation is acting like a museum curator sharing the best art in an art museum or a wedding DJ playing the best songs at a wedding.

Content curation is the physical act of a person (not a computer) finding and sharing the best of other people’s content.

According to Curata, content curation is when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates, and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market.

What is the sweet spot between content creation and content curation? 

According to research that explored the sweet spot of how much brands should use content curation vs. content creation, the optimal balance for organizations is a 60/40 ratio of content curation vs. content creation.

In other words, 60 percent should be content curation and 40 percent should be content creation. This research was based on analyzing more than 150,000 social media posts.

What are the main benefits of content curation? 

Content curation will help you:

1. Incorporate outside voices – content curation helps you show your audience how your content or brand voice fits into the larger picture of the industry
2. Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) – content curation can help you create additional website pages and provide content for your corporate social media channels
3. Support your lead generation efforts – content curation increases your website traffic, which can lead to increased leads
4. Build your brand awareness – content curation will help you provide your audience with a constant stream of quality content from a variety of sources beyond just your content
5. Establish your credibility as a thought leader – content curation will help you become a “go-to information” source and encourages your audience to trust you as an authority on certain topics
6. Streamline your lead nurturing – you can use curated content via your email newsletters, providing you with more content to nurture leads
7. Improve your social media and blogging editorial calendar – content curation will help you supplement your social media and blogging editorial calendar/schedule with fresh and relevant content with your audience

Why content curation?

Content curation efforts are critical to ensuring your content marketing efforts are successful. However, content curation takes some work. To make content curation easier, there are five free resources that can help you save time.

Check out this infographic below for more information about why you should curate content, the key benefits of content curation, and how content curation can help you overcome some common content marketing challenges:

This infographic was created by Curata.