Curate content or create it yourself? [infographic]

Written by Sophie Derks | Apr 29, 2024 9:43:21 AM

Even though good content is now the preeminent way to drive more visitors to your site and convert them into leads in an honest "inbound" way, the amount of content you have to produce on a constant basis often feels overwhelming. Who is going to do it and when? And how do you maintain quality? Content curation could be a solution.

Content curation can be thought of as the digital clipping newspaper: collecting relevant content (images, articles, videos, infographics or social media posts) from external sources and sharing it with your target audience.

You can do this automatically (based on algorithms that make careful selections based on sources and keywords approved by you) or manually.

Curating content, why do it?

Ideally, you want all your content to be authentic and come from your own hands. That way you maintain control over what your organization puts out there. But this requires quite a bit of manpower and is often simply not feasible. Content curation has therefore been embraced by an awful lot of organizations because it eliminates a major problem: time. Moreover, you don't always need to hire copywriters or designers to share valuable content with your target audience.

By sharing relevant content with your prospects and customers, you as an organization also build knowledge leadership in your industry, because you show that you are up to date with current events. By curating content, you can claim this knowledge and further build thought leadership.

Curating content, what should you watch out for?

There are also some drawbacks to content curation. These disadvantages are fairly easy to get rid of provided that you handle the borrowed content well.

First of all, the content belongs to someone else and you take over this knowledge without asking. When you neatly mention the source of the original author with a backlink you are not stealing the credits.
When you want to copy a written article on your site or blog, duplicate content can be a problem, especially if the borrowed source is in the same language. Try to write your own piece as much as possible with possibly some quotes from the original piece. That way you still make the content "your own" without claiming you wrote it. Again, mention the original source.
Curating content is not recommended if you want to use it as your only form of content. Your future customers want to hear a piece of authenticity from you and not from someone else. So the balance has to be right.

Speaking of balance...

Are you going to curate content or create your own?

I'd like to end dot blog with an infographic (curated from Venngage!), which I found on this lovely blog from Impact. The infographic shows the relationship between content creation and content curation.

And if, after reading this article, you still want to stick to content of your own manufacture, this roadmap for creating a content strategy can get you started.