Content Curation for Newbies

Successful content curation

Image courtesy of Pixabay and PublicDomainPictures

Listen up newbies! Content curation is not copy-pasting your favorite aspects from someone else’s commentary or post. It is not regurgitating everything you’ve read online. And it is certainly not re-wording others’ articles. Content curation is the community manager version of an art curator. It is a refined and highly analytical business of cherry-picking puzzle pieces from a wealth of information, and introducing it in a new, organized, and coherent way. It is becoming well-versed on certain subjects and drawing your own conclusions and connections to share with your community.

Seek Knowledge

The first portion of content curation, similar to an art curator pursuing an academic degree, is to envelop yourself into seeking knowledge. This can manifest itself as research, web-surfing, informational interviews, and more. It is the stage where you equip yourself to be able to make informed decisions around weeding through great and good information versus bad information on a certain topic. Know the who, what, why, when, and where of topics pertaining to your community.

Make Extractions

The next phase is to pull the puzzle pieces from everything you’ve learned, similar to an art curator selecting artworks to place in a gallery. At this point you should feel confident enough to select the aspects, themes, and specific pieces of information that are most relevant to your audience and that you can draw connections between in a valuable way. The pieces of information you choose to focus on should be accurate and clear. In laymen’s terms, the information you are weeding out can consist of points of view on a certain subject, best practices, popular topics, buzz words, and more. Get some content curation tools to help you out.

Paint a Picture

The last stage is to sit down, quiet your mind, and put the puzzle together. It is all in the design and delivery, similar to an art curator creating the display in a gallery. Consider these three questions when building your puzzle: do I see an interesting and fresh connection between the pieces? Do I have a conclusion that I haven’t read about yet; something new that I can offer to my audience? Is there a creative, innovative way to package this information and offer it to my community (e.g. a riveting infographic)?

Take pride in your content just as a good art curator would in their art pieces. The benefit of your selectivity in value-added content allows for a loyal following and rich community in return. Content curation for newbies. To learn more about how to better curate, considering we are all content curators, visit Mashable’s take on it.