Picture taken from iSpionage.

Marketers, brands, CEO’s, teenagers, your neighbour, your grandmother and yourself, and maybe even your dog somehow, share’s content online. Whether you tweet about a song your listening to, share a video on Facebook or you take a picture of your lunch and post it on Instagram, this is content that is being shared through social media. For marketers, any serious social media strategy must include both curated content and created content. But what are they? What are the differences and why must we include these two terms in our social media strategy? Let’s start off by defining the two.


Created Content

Did you Instagram a photo of your home-made cupcakes this morning? Did you write a blog post about your trip to Europe? This is created content. It is anything that you post online that was made/created by you! You own it. It is yours and nobody else’s. It’s a new idea or thought that you came up with, hence created. Creating content helps with SEO, brings traffic to your website, can drive conversions and helps grow your personal brand to establish you as an expert in your field.


Curated Content

On the other hand, did you share a friend’s Facebook post? Retweet an article from a co-worker or wrote a blog post using Content Curation - Seek Sense Sharesomeone else’s content? This is what curation means. Curated content is simply sharing external content. It’s about gathering, organizing and understanding someone else’s works and sharing it to your audience. Everyday I make sure I take a couple hours of my time and read SoMe articles to stay in the loop. I take the ones I’m most interested in, and the posts that I think my audience will enjoy reading, and share it. Curating other publications’ content and sharing it with your audience shows that you actually care about informing them and not just care about pushing out your own promotional messages. Curating content, from Harold Jarche, has a three step process: Seek, Sense and Share. First, you have a goal that’s based off of your business’ overall objective. You have seek relevant and useful content. Then, you make sense of the content. How do you interpret the information? And lastly, you share it. Give the best content to your audience in a format that they can easily digest and apply it. Oh yea – I almost forgot the most important part. Don’t forget to give credit! If you don’t show recognition, you will be caught, laughed at and called out on it. Like I said before, it’s a good thing to curate your content!


Why?

Isn’t the whole point of being on social for your brand to push out things about your brand and your brand only? NO. I see so many brands on social just talking about themselves and it’s just so wrong. Have you ever went on a date and the other person talked about themselves all night? Don’t tell me you’re still seeing that person. How boring is that? There is absolutely nothing wrong with sharing content that isn’t yours! It’s not frowned upon so get cracking! There are so many advantages to it too. You can’t generate enough content on your own to keep your feeds full. It helps save you time and sharing someone else’s content makes you part of a community. Additionally, when people see that you take the time to view their works and share it, they’ll likely want to build a relationship with you and return the favour! This is why curating content must be part of your social media strategy – just make sure the content you are sharing remains relevant to your brand, your goals and your audiences wants and needs.

This blog post is a mixture of both. I didn’t come up with the terms Created and Curated Content. I learned the two from someone else, however, this post is my own – my words, my thoughts and, therefore, I own it!

Content is King

Are you a curator or creator or both? Do you work as a Content Marketer for brands? I’d love to hear your insights and experiences.

Kayla

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