When it comes to planning your online content strategy and thinking about different forms of content you can use, curation is an area you should consider.

Why is this important I hear you ask – well I’ll explain to you with this analogy.

Imagine you have a messy, cluttered spare room at home; full of old stuff and junk which needs sorting out. Where and how do you begin? You don’t know what’s in there, and you don’t know what you want to keep or get rid of.

What is clear is that the room needs to be tidied up and organized so that you know what’s in there, and where to find everything.

 

The internet can feel like this room at times; an overly cluttered space full of content which can overwhelm some people as they struggle to figure out what it is they’re looking for and how to organise the information that’s important to them.

They need someone to help them organise things – make sense of it all. This is where the role of content curation comes into play. Content curation is about organizing, filtering and making sense of information available on the internet – bringing it all together in one place and using it to provide value to your audience.

Content curation is already an important feature for many online journalists. A few weeks ago I spoke about Storify which curates social media content.

Have a look at this article I was reading today:‘Web curation news and tools for journalists’ for more ideas on how journalists use curation to tell stories.

 

It’s not just in journalism where curation is used. It’s also a great way of building authority and positioning yourself as as industry expert if you’re a small business owner or freelancer.

You can bring together quality content from all over the web for the benefit of your readers/customers. The sort of content you should look at curating can include: Industry news from online articles, important blog posts from influential bloggers, tweets from twitter feeds, online videos, ebooks to download, whitepapers.

When you curate content, you bring together and share different information which you hope your audience will find useful, informative and entertaining.

Not only are you helping your readers, but you’re showing them that you’re an important source of valuable information. You’re positioning yourself as an industry expert, someone who’s up to date and informed on industry news, gossip and trends.

 

It’s important to remember with curation that it’s not just about finding content; you also need to organise and make sense of the information you have. For journalists it’s important that they provide a narrative for the reader – the curated content has to help tell a bigger story.

Even if you’re not a journalist, you should still bear this in mind. The content you bring together still needs a structure to it, there has to be some form of context to all the different sources.

Finally, don’t overlook the fact that curation gives you the chance of creating your own original content by providing your own commentary for further analysis and opinion, this should again help your reader make sense of the information you’ve curated for them.