What do they say? You learn more from your mistakes than you failures. Not sure who they are but they must know what they are talking about.
When I came across this post recently this quite came to mind. So first let’s cover what the mistakes are then we’ll break down each one with our own thoughts.
It’s impossible for marketers to create enough original, high-quality content for each channel every day, which is why many rely on content curation to help build brand awareness and generate leads via social media and email marketing.
1. Skimming The Headline And Sharing Immediately.
2. Checking Only The Most-Popular Stories And Sources For Content.
3. Not Personalizing For Your Audience.
4. Promoting The Same Content Across Every Channel.
5. Spending Too Much Time Curating Content.
Skimming and Sharing
Yes this is a bad practice but one that’s mostly done on social media. The curation we typically talk about here is where you curate content on your own site or a vertical site. This is a behavior in social media that will never go away though. It’s obvious each time we get a false death alert on a celebrity, you see the updates and re-shares like crazy.
Checking Most Popular Stories
While I agree in principle on this one I also have changed my mind over the last year or so. I used to say that you shouldn’t curate on the topic of the day. This thinking is wrong. We’ll be diving into this deeper in up and coming posts but the high level is… what is more important in curation is not necessarily the content you are curating but your perspective or your commentary. There’s also the your audience perspective that we’ll cover more in detail in the coming weeks.
Not Personalizing for Your Audience
This is a big one and one that you will learn the more you curate. You’ll start to find the things that your audience cares about. What types of things makes them stop and pay attention. This is also another topic we will cover in detail in the coming weeks.
Promoting Same Content in Every Channel
Once again a social media specific thing. It is important to think about how specific content will play on each individual network. Often times this means creating special updates, messages, or assets for each individual network. Yes this is extra effort but in the long run it does pay off as people appreciate value.
Spending Too Much Time Curating
This is a big one. There’s 2 ways to solve this.
Have a series of system and processes that work for you and your business and follow them. Or build curation into your daily workflow and consumption. Which one works for you will depend on your daily schedule and your individual style. The important aspect is to ensure the time and effort your spending curating is engaging your audience and ultimately converting.
Sometimes we’ve found people enjoy the act of finding and consuming content that they forget the act of curation should be tied to conversions.
Image courtesy ragan.com
