Social Media Strategy – 16 Ways to Add Value When Curating Content

The session I am presenting today at the Social Media Strategies Summit in Dallas is on “3 Keys to Curating Content without Losing Your Brand Voice.”

Social Media Strategy and Curating Content

Curating content essentially means searching out and sharing content through a brand’s social media outlets that originated from some other source, whether that is another brand, organization, or individual.

At the extreme, if all (or nearly all) the content an entity shares online was originally created elsewhere, it is functioning as no more than an aggregator of others’ content.

As we will discuss and work with the idea of curating content in today’s session, “curation” implies a brand is adding at least some value to the content it shares even though it did not produce the original source content.

16 Ways to Add Value When Curating Content

What are some of the ways a brand can add value when curating content? Here are sixteen ideas organized in three broad areas:

Endorsing

• Cull lots of content to the best content that's available
• Offer a dependable point of view
• Develop a resource / tool list
• Provide disinterested objectivity

Packaging / Compiling / Pointing

• Find the undiscovered
• Compile material others cannot
• Organize it better, easier, in new ways
• Provide timeliness to delivering the aggregated content
• Provide coordinated timing in delivering the content
• Develop an entire sweep / survey of a topic
• Integrate the content in new and inventive ways with other content

Enlightening

• Add new insights
• Challenge the original perspective
• Bring your expertise to it
• Supply inside knowledge
• Provide an encyclopedic, “timeless” treatment of the topic

Beyond these ideas, it is vital that a brand identify and curate content that contributes to its brand position in smart ways. We will provide a framework for how social strategists can unpack a brand’s foundation documents to generate ideas for curating content. Additionally, we will share a strategic brief format specifically to help a social media team actively curate on-brand content on an ongoing basis.

If you aren’t with us at the Social Media Strategies Summit in Dallas, but you’d like to learn more about this social media strategy approach we’ll be sharing, let us know. We’d be happy to fill you in on more of the details.  - Mike Brown

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