Content curation is an essential tool for content marketers to add value to the content and highlight their domain expertise. Rather than simply sharing your content, you may share relevant content created by third parties which your audience may enjoy reading.

Therefore, the role of a content curator is to share the most relevant content with the audience. It may be a blog post, a piece of advice or a thought leader, or an insight that your target audience will appreciate and enjoy. Every retweet or reshare is an effective content curation strategy that may help you take your online business up a notch. 

Advantages of Content Curation
 

1. Bridges Gaps in the Content Calendar: Content marketing involves creating a content calendar that ensures regular posting across several social media platforms several times per week. A content calendar is usually created by the in-house marketing team. However, sometimes it may have gaps, as you might be at a loss for innovative posts. Content curation is an easy fix for this challenge. You may reshare other people’s thoughts, ideas, or views and maintain a regular posting schedule. 
2. Delivers Value to the Followers: Your followers follow you to gain knowledge, develop and improve their skills in your area of expertise. Everything you share on social media does not have to be your intellectual resource. You do not have a monopoly over your industry therefore, you should not demonstrate that either. It is best to share relevant content that others have shared with your followers to give them different perspectives on things rather than just targeting sales-based content. 
3. Establishes Thought Leadership: By sharing relevant and informative content on your feed you make it worth reading. You may also add a line or two of your views, opinions, or insight to the post to make it more attractive and marketable. By adding an insight of your own, you can strengthen your reputation and deliver the clarity that helps readers understand the latest happenings and updates in your industry. 
4. Builds Network: Sharing third-party content on your feed is a great way to build a network especially if it brings extra traffic. If you come across some information worth sharing, be sure to inform them and never ask for anything in return. Let them know their work was valuable for your followers & you will look into their posts to gain knowledge in the future. Such conversations will help you build strong relationships with other leaders and help you grow organically. 

How To Do Content Curation The Best Way To Grow Your Online Business? 

Before you decide to share any piece of information with your readers, ask yourself a few things: 
 

• Who am I sharing with?
• How will this help them?
• Is the source of information reliable? 
• Is the content unique and worthy to be shared? 

To find answers to these questions, you should adopt the best content curation strategies and practices that can take your online business to the next level. Here are some: 
 

• Identify Your Audience: Audience research is the most crucial part of content marketing and content curation. It is first necessary to analyze your target audience before you share curated content. One way you may do this is by building audience personas. This will help you visualize them as real people and understand their expectations and standards. You must be selective and share only desired content on your channels. Pay attention to the engagement levels to learn what kind of content vibes with your followers to curate content in a better way in the future. 
• Add a Personal Take: A simple reshare or a retweet is useless for your followers and will not lead to post engagement. You need to add a comment to explain your take on the resource you shared with your followers. It does not have to be a long description, a few sentences can do the trick and add value to your curated content. Moreover, if you can add a unique insight it is even better to increase traffic. All your followers want is to understand your perspectives and opinions on the content you shared. 
• Link or Tag the Source: It is necessary to remember that content curation is about sharing the content of third parties and not plagiarism. Content scraping is unethical and illegal, so you must not be a part of it. When you share other people’s content, provide a link to the source or tag it to your social media accounts. If you add content from other sources on your blog, share a short preview and link the original content to your blog to view the entire text. As discussed above, an effective content curation strategy helps you build a network, only if you respect and provide due credit to the content creators. 
• Quick Check Content Before Sharing: Before you share content with your audience you should read it yourself, analyze its credibility and make sure all facts are correct. Everything you read online cannot be trusted. Therefore, it is best to rely on yourself for fact-checking before sharing curated content with your target audience. 
• Schedule Curated Content Posting: It is best to schedule content posting in advance so you can maintain a regular posting routine without having to be available at your desk all the time. There are free web tools available that schedule your valuable content to be posted at the right time from your system with just a click. 

Final Thoughts 

Thus, by picking the right topic to share, personalizing, setting agendas, collaborating with content creators, and allowing automation using content curation tools you can deliver the desired content to your target audience. All you need to have is an effective content curation strategy in place to take your online business to new heights.