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Recently, the Trump campaign faced flak for plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s convention speech from eight years ago, and got no mercy from the press. When you borrow lines from a speech and pass it off as your own at events of national importance, you will be outed quickly.

In the online world, stealing others’ content – or content scraping as it is called – is detected and punished by search engines. It’s definitely something you should be worried about as there’s no getting away with it.

Often, the reason for content scraping is a lack of time to create fresh content. When businesses face pressure to fill their site or social media pages with content, but have no means to generate it, the temptation to misuse others’ efforts can be too much to resist. The ethical and safe way to share content without having to create it from scratch is to curate it. The most efficient way to curate content is through a content curation app.

Curation gives credit where it is due

When you curate a piece of content on your blog, you mention the author of that piece and link back to his/her article. That’s not all, you also add your own ideas to the post (to enhance its overall value) or maybe annotate certain parts of it with your own experiences, or summarize content from multiple sources while giving proper source credit and attribution.

You can also curate bits and pieces of your post – maybe start off introducing a topic, putting in into context for your readers, and using quotes from curated articles to explain a concept or support your opinions. Or you can post an excerpt of the original post and provide your own commentary in your own brand voice. The author name, website url and article title must be accurately stated.

Curation allows you to satisfy your readers’ content needs and build relationships with influencers. It’s a win-win for all parties, a smart way to keep your social media marketing pipeline filled with valuable content without substantial effort or time consumption.

Curating for social media made easy

Curating is more time-efficient than writing fresh content. But it must start by identifying credible web resources and influencers who both you and your readers can trust as an authority on the particular topic or industry. That means looking at social media profiles, news outlets, industry blogs, journals and other online sources for content.

Manually searching for relevant, interesting posts to share on social media is time-consuming. It may be unfeasible if you can dedicate only a few minutes of your time to social media engagement. These few minutes are best dedicated to answering fans’ questions, handling customer support issues, and posting company news and announcements.

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So, how can you speed up curation without compromising on quality and leveraging content from a variety of online sources? With a content curation app.

Benefits of a content curation app

The social media content you share must be (a) relevant to your audience (b) as unique as possible, offering new information, and (c) well-founded and well-presented. Your curation process must factor in this criteria or else your audience will reject your content or feel discouraged to share it.

Get customers’ attention with quality content

A curation app brings you quality content on just about any topic, helping you establish a reputation as an authority on a subject matter, someone they can trust and stay connected to. It can be useful in moving people down the sales funnel, and converting ‘on the fence’ customers into brand advocates.

DrumUp, for instance, uses sophisticated algorithms to suggest fresh stories of relevance to your audience. All you have to do is supply keywords and the app does all the intelligent searching and retrieving for you.

Share fresh stories that attract audience interest and interaction

One of the challenges businesses face on social media is actually getting their audience to interact with them through comments and replies. An easy way of encouraging conversations is to share articles on current topics and events. There’s a good chance people may already be following the stories and conversing about them. A little motivation is all they need to engage actively with the current topics of interest being discussed and debated in your industry, news outlets and social media.

Add variety and augment your existing content

Curation is a smart way of scaling up your content without expending too much energy and time. Of course, you must try as much as possible to devote some time to creating original content. A content curation app will come in handy during those times when you have nothing besides sales messages to share. The app will help you meet your 30/60/10 mix of owned/curated/promotional content.

In addition to simple articles, you can also curate GIFs, emojis, hashtags and @mentions to spice up your social media posts.

Save time managing your social media accounts

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Manage multiple social media accounts more efficiently

Content curation app DrumUp offers a social media management dashboard where you can add multiple accounts and get a single, unified view of shared posts. You can tweak the dashboard settings to suit your posting preferences and share content with a single click! Add your commentary, introduce the content of the post, weave audiences in with a catchy question or title – preface the post to capture interest and clicks. It’s a quick and easy way to stay connected with your fans, while also eliminating the extra time taken to log in and out of each social media account.

Curate and schedule on-the-go

A content curation app ensures seamless posting from desktop to mobile device. For instance, in iPhone or Android app form, DrumUp lets you check up on content suggestions, make changes if necessary, schedule and add a custom post – all via a user-friendly interface. It gives a new meaning to proactive engagement while offering substantial productivity gains. These apps help you manage social media on the go.

Curation is not limited to third-party content. You can curate your own content, especially evergreen articles that educate readers who’re unfamiliar with a particular topic or new to something some of their peers may already know about. In this way, your blog or social media pages can serve as a library of reference – that go-to source accessible with a login or bookmarked so readers can return to your site or a particular webpage with a single click.

A checklist of tips to make the most of a content curation app

• Setup different types of content curation systems – keyword sets and RSS feeds. Using keyword sets (filtering out negative keywords) and the RSS feeds of your favorite news agencies and blogs, you can collect a variety of content that your audience would appreciate in one, organized place on your DrumUp dashboard.
• Use negative keywords and well constructed RSS feeds to ensure the app curates only what is suitable for your audience.
• Make use of the hashtag and @mention recommendations suggested by the app to increase reach on social media.
• Check DrumUp’s social media analytics dashboard from time to time to see what content your audience is responding to most. You can sort posts by popularity on each social media page/account connected to DrumUp.
• Install DrumUp’s social media management Chrome extension (it’s free) and save posts you think are interesting while browsing, so you can use them at a later point.

Note – This post was first published on Aug 1, 2016 and has since been updated with new information.
 
Image credit : Esther Vargas via Flickr