I bet you’ve come across all those blog posts talking about how curated content is an integral part of your marketing strategy and how it will help your business and brand grow and so on. And yes, indeed, it will do so. Content curation can be an excellent opportunity to expand your marketing strategy, and it can be very impactful to your overall online presence.
However, curated content has a dark side.
But have no fear of the dark!
In this blog post, you will learn all about the pitfalls of curated content and how to avoid falling into them.
The Distorted World Of Content Curation
Now that you’ve come this far, let me be completely open about this: There is no dark “side” of curated content. It’s all dark.
Curated content has been around since the dawn of the Internet. The earliest forms of curated content occurred as simple links that pointed to other existing content on the Web. Over time these ancient forms evolved into more sophisticated content curation tools like Scoop.it!, Triberr, PublishThis, and many more.
Content curation is the practice of collecting and sharing existing content about a particular topic with your social audience. Although content curation requires fewer resources, there are many side effects of its usage. Some of the damages that curated content can do to your business are:
- Curated content can cause your Brand Value to suffer – Both, publishers and customers, find less brand value in curated content. Therefore curated content will never do what created content does best, invoke strong, positive emotion toward your brand;
- Using curated content can result in Legal Liabilities – Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed;
- Traffic Leaking – when sharing content from the same few sources, chances are that your audience will turn their back on you and go for the original sources.
- Just another noise-maker: Your social followers are following you for a dose of originality that you showed with your social updates. When you start reposting other people’s content that they can find elsewhere, you’ve lost the originality, and you’re just another noise-maker.
Despite all this, many are still searching for an easy and cheap way to fill-up their social pages. Curated content may play a role on your site, but the chances are that you should be placing a no-index tag on those pages.
Content Curation & Social Traffic: A Bad Match
From a social traffic perspective, curated content is quite dark too. It’s toxic. When your audience starts to engage with your curated content, they end up on other websites. And if you don’t pay closer attention, you can end up using your social presence to drive social traffic to your competitors instead.
Curated content harms the ranking of your site as well.
Every time someone likes, comments, or shares your content, it helps you boost your social knot. But when you curate content from different sources, you create social backlinks for other sites, and not yours.
Nobody who is a social follower will ever see your curated content and say ‘WOW, I really love how this brand is using other people’s content, I’d love to do business with these guys.’
How Created Content Brings Your Business In The Spotlight
The debate about Curated Content vs. Created Content is a hot topic in the content marketing world.
Curated content vs. Created content, what’s better? Well, some businesses might actually find some value in curated content, but for the majority, it just doesn’t make sense.
Created content, on the other hand, is originally produced content, like blog posts, infographics, and videos that live on your social channels. When this created content is the fuel of your social media marketing efforts, the results are… well, amazing.
Great content alone needs an igniting sequence, and sharing it on Social Media is the missing spark. Each piece of content you create represents the unique expertise, products, and services of your company.
If you are sharing content that your audience could and most likely have read somewhere else, what long-term value are you providing to them?
90% of customers say that authenticity is important when deciding which brand they support. 61% believe that created content is not only the most authentic form of content but also the most influential when making purchasing decisions.
What You’re Missing out When You Post Curated Content on Social Media
If you go a step further and read a bit more into the numbers, we could perhaps say that those 90% that value authenticity, will find it annoying if they find copied/curated content on a brand’s social media pages. And, if those 61% buyers that get encouraged to take their business to the brand that is original, may probably decide to walk away from a brand that’s posting curated social updates.
Food for thought.
There are no Shortcuts: Created Content = Business Growth
Image from Freepik
The content you are creating should reveal your expertise in your field and give valuable answers to your audience’s questions.
There are many benefits of posting freshly baked content on your social channels.
Let’s look at some of the ways that created content can improve the overall well-being of your business:
- Created content allows you to position your organization as a thought leader in your industry, with unique insights, knowledge, and perspectives;
- Created content improves SEO & Drives Social Awareness. The more original your content, the better it is for search engines to find it. By producing your own content, you save your business from the troubles of competing over keywords;
- Created content helps you Establish Trust Within Your Audience. Created content creates a stronger bond between you and your audience. The more quality content your customers see from you, the more likely they are to have a positive feeling about your brand;
- Created content helps you Build Your Brand Reputation. Your business is more likely to show in the top rankings in search results when it’s recognized as a credible source of information. Additionally, customers are more inclined to trust you if they see you as an expert in your industry;
- Content creation helps you Generate Leads. Though providing unique, high-quality content, you enhance the engagement of your site’s visitors. These visitors are most likely to become your potential customers if they like what they see.
Populizr – The Chef behind Each Unique Piece of Content
More and more content is shared every day, both good and bad.
Under the pressure of regular posting, a lot of inferior content is continuously released into the World Wide Web, which makes it easy to neglect quality pieces.
With so much content on hand, distinguishing your business or brand from the competition is hard. That’s why creating an effective content marketing strategy is essential for the success of your business.
Populizr is a great helping hand to businesses trying to create a competitive edge. Through its emotions analyzer build-in feature, Populizr will help you ensure the uniqueness of your content and position yourself in the top rankings in the search results.
The platform also helps you craft 25 unique social posts from every blog post you publish online, in less than 4 minutes.
The key problem that brands try to avoid when using curated content is that it’s difficult to regularly create fresh social content that points back to your website.
If you take any social media scheduling app and run a blog post through it, all you get on the other end are standard and repetitive posts containing the blog Title, Meta description, and featured image. So when you set a campaign for daily posting of a blog post for say 30 days, what you end up getting is 30 identical updates to your corporate FB page.
This is so repetitive that you’d eventually get the opposite effect: reduced followers and social engagement. Why? Because nobody wants to see the same updates over and over again.
So How Does Populizr Help You Solve This Issue?
Any time you run a blog post through Populizr, you can create up to 26 unique social updates. Populizr will take the Title and Meta description, and create 5 variation suggestions that you can then tweak.
And, if you’ve done well with adorning your blog with say 5 images, Populizr will take these 5 freshly created variants of the blog Title and Meta description, mix them up with the 5 blog images, and build you a list of 25 generated social updates. Plus, the original one that contains the original Title and Meta description.
So now, you can schedule these 26 variants to auto-post for say 30 days. And if you opt-out of posting updates during weekends, you will effectively achieve total freshness on your social pages. Even though you’d be posting one unique variant per day, they will all point to the same blog post, and your audience will not be inundated with duplicate social posts.
The great thing about this is that there’s an Emotions and Sentiment Analyzer that will help you tweak the Title and Description variants, so you can make sure your social posts are hitting the right emotions with your audience. That way, you ensure that your updates will resonate with your audience before you even post anything.
How much does all this take: No more than 10 minutes per campaign. When you get the hang of it, you can stamp out social campaigns in just 4 minutes.
And, if you use the Populizr WordPress plugin, you can pre-select the text excerpts you’d want to push as social updates. Then, any time you run a blog post through Populizr, it may take you a minute or two to just verify that everything looks great, and hit the Schedule button.
Altogether, this platform is a potent weapon to help you conquer the world of created content.
‘91% of customers are prepared to reward brands for their authenticity,’ says Social Media Week.
Through the created content, your prospects get a clearer idea of why they should choose what you have to offer over your competitors.
Ask Yourself, Do You Want to be the Curator or the Curated?
When you opt for using Curated Content to drive your online presence, and especially your Social Media Marketing, it’s clearly obvious to your followers that you’re not the author of those materials. In this case, you’re a referrer. That’s a valuable role in any social or professional network – the person who knows and connects people. But is that the role you want your business to play?
Wouldn’t you rather be the one connecting with people because you know your story and because you know how to tell it to people while creating emotional connections?
By posting curated content, you are not sharing unique stories, and you are not saying anything interesting about your brand, which means you are not making an emotional connection with your audience. And even if the content you share is valuable, you don’t get the credit for it, nor the benefits of your audience’s engagement, which technically makes you the middleman and middleman is easily forgettable.
Share Thoughtful Opinions – Not Just Echoes
So let me ring the bell once more, who do you want to be, the Curator or the Curated?
The Curated, of course.
It is time to stop being the third wheel and to take your company’s success in your own hands.
Populizr and its unique features are always there to give you a helping hand and set you apart from your competitors!
Start your 30 Days Free Trial today and climb on top of rankings in the search results!
May the Force be with you!
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