We live in a digital age, where information is no longer found through the phone book or word-of-mouth; rather, people get their information from the Internet, primarily using search engines such as Google. Because of this Internet phenomenon, having an online presence as a business is the best possible strategy for marketing your company and services. However, not everyone is a natural writer and not everything needs a blog post. Repurposing content and content curation can be a great way to share valuable information to your customers and prospective customers through your website. Here’s how to create meaningful content that’s been repurposed:
What Exactly is Content Curation?
Content curation refers to the process of finding already existing content and organizing that content in a way that’s relevant to your customers or potential customers. Oftentimes, content curation can involve using very similar content but on a new medium, hence the name “repurposing” content, or giving the content a new purpose. Creating high quality repurposed content involves more than just using already existing content, though; high-quality content will also add new information, a new perspective, or new relevant questions.
What’s the Point of Content Curation?
Content curation is a marketing tool that’s used by companies for their blogs or websites. The point of content curation is to provide valuable information to your customers or potential customers by cutting down the time they spend sifting through useless information. By using content curation, you create content that provides important information to site visitors that’s easy to find and navigate.
How Does Content Curation Work?
Content curation has three primary aspects that go into its creation, which are filtering, analysis, and social rating. Each of these three things can be done either manually or automatically, depending upon the technology that you have access to.
Filtering: Filtering is exactly what is sounds like—choosing material (either through personal preference, votes and views from a social community, or due to the information’s relevance) that should be included in future content based on its current effectiveness.
Analysis: Semantic analysis is the process of looking at a problem and finding information and relationships between existing information that answer that problem. For example, if the problem is “How do I explain my product?” then semantic analysis looks at content to ensure that it’s solving the problem by examining the relationship between statements, facts, and sources in the content.
Social Rating: Social rating simply means that the content that you choose for repurposing was chosen based on the fact that it received a high social rating. This is usually used for social media sites, like Facebook.
When you’re attempting to repurpose content for your own blog or website, the most important aspect you should focus on is filtering already existing information, and adding new, relevant content, too. Use hyperlinks, incorporate multimedia, address the problem, and make a schedule for yourself of when you’ll be posting.
Why You Should Repurpose and Curate Content
Copying and pasting old information into a new blog post simply for the sake of having something on your website isn’t helpful—it doesn’t provide customers with any new information whatsoever.
What is helpful, however, is taking bits and pieces of old information and making it new and exciting for those who visit your site/blog. A great example of repurposing content was Martin Brossman’s Hangout-On-Air with David Amerland about “What’s Beyond Interruption Advertising?” When Brossman went to put the information on his blog, it would have been really easy to just transcribe the dialogue. Instead, though, Brossman added new, free content and ideas that he learned in the interview, and organized it in an easy-to-navigate and relevant fashion.
Essentially, your job is to find content that you think is meaningful, and then to explain why it’s meaningful to your customers. By doing so, you’ll be creating a website or blog with a strong online presence, you’ll drive more traffic to your site, and you’ll be providing customers and potential customers with what they need.
by Olga Santo Tomás Monroe 919-604-0104 olgamaria3@aol.com Social Media Marketing and Management
Connect to me on G+: https://plus.google.com/+OlgaSantoTom%C3%A1sMonroe/posts
Learn more about the Social Media Management Certification Program at: http://smmcp.wpengine.com
