Diving into our Content Curation Process
Content curation is a useful skill. It helps us build relationships with our audience and generally makes us a more knowledgeable, reliable resource to others.
If you’re wondering what exactly content curation is, summed up, the content curation process simply means sourcing and sharing content relevant to your expertise, industry, and audience. One of our content curation examples is this LinkedIn post studying Disney’s storytelling process:
Curation is important to PR and content creation and, like third-party studies, it’s critical to persuasive arguments — which can back up your claims and help share your point of view.
But more than that, finding and sharing content from external sources is how we stay current, understand different perspectives, and many times build out our own. We don’t know what we don’t know, so when we explore others’ work, our own view is expanded.
It’s why we devote a whole section of our monthly newsletter to content we’ve curated specifically for our audience:
One benefit of content curation is when you share and monitor consistently you learn more about your audience preferences. This Twitter thread about raising independent thinkers is the most popular piece of curated content in our newsletter so far. We’ve also learned over time that “funny” doesn’t work as well as “deep.”
The more you know your audience, the better you can curate, create, and pitch, when the time is right.
Other benefits of content curation include:
Positioning and boosting your brand as a thought leader
Diversifying your content calendar (work smarter, not harder)
Fitting your brand POV into popular trends and news
With the right process (we’ve got you covered here), curation is efficient and quick
Not everyone is a great content curator, but I would argue that it’s a practice and a mindset. A curator is always in “spotting” mode. You can train yourself to effectively search, find, catalog, and apply cool content your audience would love to know about (and love you even more for sharing!).
Now let’s dive into our process and provide some content curation examples.
It’s easier than you think.
The Ins and Outs of our Content Curation Process
Consider Your Audience
Before you go poking around the vast corners of the internet for content, there’s one thing you have to think about first: your audience.
Here are three audience basics to think about before you begin the content curation process:
WHO is your audience: Are they comms professionals, finance leaders, fitness influencers, or travel gurus? Determining who they are and what they do will naturally lead you to the next question…
WHY they do what they do: Think about what your audience cares about and why. What are the end goals, processes, and problems they’re trying to solve? Creative professionals in spaces like content and PR are constantly trying to elevate their brand (or their client’s) by telling stories, building relationships, jumping on trends… the list goes on.
WHAT they need to do their job: What are the ways they’re choosing to fulfill their end goals, fill holes in their processes, and patch up problems? Where are they going to do it — Forbes? CIO.com? Vogue? Or think of places they would go if they had the time. Also, consider what tools they’d need to make their lives easier. That’s what led us to share a post on Snipd, an app that allows you to clip and save podcast segments when you’re listening on the go. Another helpful thing to think about here is what they may be interested in outside of their own industry.
Determining who your audience is and documenting these answers will serve you well when figuring out where to look and if a piece of content is ripe for curation. It’ll also help you identify your niche. For Carve, our ideal audience is in-house marketing and comms professionals and C-suite execs looking to grow their brands. Our curation niche is creative inspiration for that audience.
Get Organized
Now comes the method to my madness. My content curation process is a scrapbook of sorts, so here are some helpful tidbits from those pages.
Follow industry thought leaders and look at who they follow.
What are industry thought leaders sharing?
But don’t just look at what they’re posting, study their methods. How are they inserting their POV into the conversation? Why is it relevant? Do other people engage with the content they’ve shared?
Besides Adam Grant, here are some thought leaders I follow, within and outside of my industry:
Amanda Natividad on LinkedIn for content marketing tips
@PRisus on Twitter for PR insights (and funny memes, always)
NYT-bestselling author Adrienne Young’s newsletter for general writing and creativity help
@MrsJordanDooley on Twitter for life and entrepreneurship advice
In Josh Spector’s course on content curation, he recommends following journalists, rather than publications (and subscribe to their newsletters, too). Journalists have topics and niches they stick to, whereas publications cover more variety than you might need.
Set up automated Google Alerts
One reason I love signing up for newsletters and Google Alerts is that I can set it, forget it, and let timely content come to me. And then, in my hour of need, I can just search my inbox to see if it snagged anything good.
I recommend setting up alerts for niche topics. To figure out what these might be, refer back to the three basics of your audience (told you it would come in handy later!).
Keep a list of your favorite websites.
This is great for when you need to go out and search for content, especially if generic searches or the newsletters and feeds you follow aren’t turning up anything great. Whether in a note document or via browser bookmarks, keep a list of websites that never let you down.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Inc – all things entrepreneurship, business, leadership, and culture.
Literary Hub – for cultural analysis, literary breakdowns, and personal development.
SEMrush blog – SEO trends and updates, and content ideas.
Colossal – where I go to stretch my brain and strengthen my creative spark outside of writing and content.
Streamline Where you Keep Things
Back to the scrapbook analogy. The best part about a scrapbook is that all your most beloved pictures are stored in just one book; you’re not having to search high and low in ten different places to find what you need.
The same goes for your content curation process — keep your sources in as few places as possible.
Some people like to keep their findings in a centralized notes app. I have three main locations I keep curated content: a folder in my email inbox, computer bookmarks, and a folder on my desktop (my primary storage source).
Whenever I come across something I like, I make sure to screenshot right then and there and store it in a folder on my computer.
So now that we’ve covered how to find and catalog content, let’s talk about what to do when you think you’ve got a hit.
Evaluating if the Content Works for You
Not everything you find is going to work for your audience. Or, as Josh Spector phrases it: “Just because it’s interesting doesn’t mean it’s right.”
Here is a litmus test to see if a piece of content is share-worthy:
Going back to the original audience questions you answered, now put yourself in their shoes. Does it hit on one of the three basics? Is this something they would save for future reference?
Is there actionable value to the piece? Can the reader take the information and do something with it? Will they be inspired?
Is there a way to put your own spin and POV on it?
Again, not everything that’s interesting or excites you is necessarily a good fit for your audience.
I found a meme that I thought was hilarious (pictured above), but couldn’t make it right for Carve’s audience. However, it did inspire us to launch a LinkedIn series asking our kids to explain what we do (spoiler: it’s a lot of them saying playing anything is more fun than our jobs). Look at that … an example of content curation inspiring the curator.
If your piece passed the litmus test, congratulations! You’ve successfully navigated through the content curation process — it’s time to share the knowledge.
If this seems daunting at first, you’ll get the hang of it and figure out what works best for you. This is just a glimpse into one creative’s content curation examples and experience. The important thing is just that you share with the world. We could use a different perspective here and there.
