Content Curation

    Today, People and organizations are making and sharing media and content all over the social media. We are living in an era of content abundance. In this era of information exploration and knowledge updating, what matters is not the amount of information you can get, but the quality of information you gain in limited time. To this extent, content curation offers high value to anyone who is looking for quality content because finding information and making sense of it require more and more time, attention, and focus.

    Content curation is the process of filtering, sorting and organizing information on a niche topic through the vast amounts of content on the web to come up with the best articles, videos, photos, or social discussions going on at a given time and present them in a meaningful and organized way. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. People love this idea because they don’t need to search different sources in order to find a piece of information. That’s why content curation sites such as Tumblr, Pinterest, and Storify become increasing popular. Just take Pinterest as an example: Pinterest is a content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard. Pinterest encourage people to organize and share the things they love, and this is a great way to discover content visually. I recently joined Pinterest and found it really a wonderful place for picture exchange and collecting for personal reference.

   For individual, content curation is incredibly powerful: people get access to various forms of information related to the topic they interested in. Words, pictures, videos, lists, summaries, collections, and timelines can all be incredibly valuable resources. I think content curation is especially of great significance for online collectors because those content curation sites are ideal for them to search and organize information in a more efficient way. For those content curation sites, they can keep readers engaged and loyal to their source of information because they have filtered and organized information for them by creating more valuable content in less time and focus on more keywords. People can easily share the content through social media sites and this helps them build more traffic to their sites through social sharing.

    I would like to focus on how companies utilize content curation to their advantages. For organizations and brands, content curation can help establish the organization’s thought leadership and capture attention in today’s information cluttered world. Content curation helps to build brand authority, brand trust and brand power by sharing quality content as a resource. I think the most urgent task for a company interested in building brand through content curation is to train their staff to be good curators. Content curators continually seek, make sense of, and share the best and most relevant content on a particular topic online. They can curate on what’s trending for the moment, switching or updating the curated contents tone, and build company brand. So, for staff members of a company, content curation can be a profession of learning.

Also, taking Pinterest as an example, for curators working for a company, the first and most important thing they should do to curate content on Pinterest is pin regularly, which means signing up for an account and uploading their images on a regular basis. By pinning regularly, a company will generate a large following interested in them. In turn, those curators will be able to learn the most important needs and demands of these followers in order to curate content successfully. Another tip for curators is that they should develop as many boards as possible in Pinerest for their companies. Developing boards will significantly help curating content through organizing images into different categories. The repining feature allows people to repost images of other people to their own boards. This repining feature will help to gather all the necessary information and attract more followers. I think this is also the way content curation encourages interaction. Content curation is not only for information searching; sharing and interaction are also essential factors.

    Overall, since we all realize that we are increasingly living in a world of information overload, how to separate signal from noise and get what we are really looking for is important for both individuals and companies. Content curation provides a clear, contextually relevant voice and I believe this is the new trend for social media.