We know that content creation is an activity that takes a lot of time, thought and planning, so whilst you are creating your masterpieces, you might need to fill a few gaps to keep your audience coming back for more. This space is where content curation sits; it can be an excellent way of delivering great information to your audience when your own content production is in process.

Content curation doesn’t have to be difficult, indeed there are some great platforms on the market today to help with the process. If you use a couple of these, and also supplement with a few other ideas, you’ll be delivering a great service to help your audience cut through the clutter.

First a couple of tools

Aside from the obvious curation that is Social Media (retweets and the like) the two tools that we like to assist are:

  1. Storify, You create your story by bringing together the best of the Social Media content that has already been shared. So you get the most important voices and your narrative to create a new layer above the individual social media components. Choose tweets, images and videos and more to create your masterpiece. Once it is published you can then embed onto your own website and always go and re-edit if new information emerges.
  2. Scoopit Automate your content discovery using keywords that are relevant to your industry. Add you own narrative to the most important pieces that you find and then publish to your social media networks.

Other ideas you can use

You can easily extend the information you are finding by using these ideas:

  1. Compile a weekly (or monthly) must read list. Take the Top 5 posts from the information you have read and deliver that to your audiences. Write a sentence on each that defines why you think they should spend time reading the posts you have highlighted.
  2. Similarly, you could take your top shared tweets of the month and pull them together in a single blog post
  3. Curate your blog content into a Top 10 list
  4. Curate an image gallery of your products
  5. A panel discussion. Ask your customers, or thought leaders in your industry to answer one question, or define one idea… display all those answers together for something entirely original.

So there we have it a sneaky seven ideas you can use whilst your content masterpiece is percolating!