Content Marketing: Edit Versus Curate
Does your social media content need curation?
Before you answer consider the following: With the exploding quantity of user-generated content that continues to proliferate across social media platforms and other websites, both consumers and companies are challenged to find the optimal content to meet their needs. In the form of comments, reviews, photographs, videos, presentations and ratings, social media content is growing at an exponential rate, despite the fact that 90% of visitors lurk. Further, Forrester Research found that, the growth of social media creators, as a group, is holding steady.
Added to this is the challenge that by their nature digital experiences are fragmented. Our attention is distributed across a variety of screens, networks and forms of communication. We’re constantly receiving a broad slurp of media and messaging in which we listen for others like ourselves because those voices ring true. We consider them authentic and trustworthy.
Content marketing: edit versus curate
To master the flow of the social media conversation, social media content curation has emerged to host and facilitate the content and increase its relevancy based on context. Before you jump to the conclusion that curating and editing content are the same function, here’s a comparison chart across seven attributes.
How do you decide whether your organization should edit or curate your social media content? Companies often opt to edit content when they want to retain full control over the substance and voice of the information while they curate content when they want to select from the best of what’s available and/or to retain the authenticity of the original creator. Understand that you can use a combination of the two.
Have you used social media content curation? If so, how has your implementation worked and have you achieved your goals?
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Tip of my hat to Sam Decker of MassRelevance who was the guest on this week’s #MMChat where the topic was “Conversations Worth Having: Creating Engagement with Social Curation”.
Related reading:
Photo credit: Eoin McNamee via Flickr
2 Responses to Should You Curate Social Media Content? [Chart included]