Amplified Content Marketing

by Michael Stuart

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4 Key Tips on Building an Effective Content Curation Strategy

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Consistently creating new content is both challenging and time-consuming – but in order to compete in today’s competitive digital marketing landscape, it’s a virtual necessity in your process. From self-employed freelancers to multinational corporations, everyone’s looking to maintain a constant stream of clever, engaging social media content to keep their audience interested.

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The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare

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In 2016, SlideShare had over 70 million unique visitors per day, and it was listed by Alexa as one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. At its peak, it was such a powerhouse that Obama used the network to post his birth certificate. It also stood for years as a premier B2B social channel: In 2015, author and marketing expert Jay Baer referred to it as “content marketing’s secret weapon.”

 
 
Power users have been dropping the SlideShare channel.
 
  • Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months.
  • HubSpot, the content marketing powerhouse that posted over 60 presentations in 2017 and reached over 500,000 users, has posted only once in 2018, reaching a total of just over 1,000 users.
  • So what has caused this exodus of power users and decline in social-media prominence? A perfect storm of shifting parent-company priorities, insufficient revenues, and a user base largely outside of the US.
 
Despite SlideShare’s massive fan base, loyal users, and billions of impressions, a once-powerful channel is all but dead, and here’s why.
 
The Loss of Human Touch
The rapid growth of SlideShare from a small startup to a top website began in 2009, in a tiny room in India, when Amit Rajan, Rashmi Sinha, and Jonathan Boutelle saw the need for a “YouTube for presentations.” Within a few years, they had built a network of 38 million registered users by providing a desperately needed tool—and a new social channel for presentations.  But the key to their success wasn’t the tool, it was the human touch it added to the presentations.
 
SlideShare didn’t have a marketing team fueling its rapid growth. It relied on loyal fans. Its fans were the content creators, and to ensure the best content was featured, the team at SlideShare would manually curate the site each day, ensuring that the best presentations were prominently featured.
  • Kit Seeborg, author of Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business, was responsible for most of the content curation the users loved, she stressed how important human curation was to SlideShare.
  • The curated content was a huge hit. It was also one of the drivers of SlideShare’s email list, which, at the time of LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare in 2012, was growing by 250,000 new subscribers each week. After the sale to LinkedIn, the curation process remained a critical part of community-building, until 2016, when the program was ended. Since then, the homepage has changed very little, which was a major clue to marketing insiders that LinkedIn was giving up on SlideShare.
  • During 2016, the team of editors who had been curators for SlideShare were moved off the product to support other LinkedIn projects, such as Pulse. The SlideShare company page on LinkedIn is now blank, with only a few remaining engineers listed as employees.
 
Some alternatives to SlideShare:
  1. Host your own content. There are new plugins for websites which allow you to host your slides on your own website and allow easy sharing and embedding. 
  2. Microsoft may create a social PowerPoint for 365. That is speculation, but now that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and with the recent move to put Office in the Cloud, we could potentially see a new social aspect of PowerPoint in the future. 
  3. Use Prezi. It’s an alternative to SlideShare, but it does require you create content in Prezi’s own software rather than in PowerPoint; that requirement can be a pain for some.
  4. Use Google or Dropbox or ISSUU document sharing with their built-in presentation handling.
As we are continually bombarded with new marketing channels, tactics, and tools, one thing is clear: Slides are not going away. Events seem to give brands the personal touch the digital world just can’t, and slides are usually the No.1 content type at events.
 
The “YouTube of presentations” was at one point the number one destination for business owners and managers. It sported better demographics and site visitor loyalty than even LinkedIn. It was one of the top 100 most visited websites on the planet. Maybe that’s why LinkedIn bought it for $119 million in 2012, padding the nest eggs of serial investors and Slideshare backers Mark Cuban and Dave McClure, among others.
 
The 3 Biggest Slideshare Problems Today
 
  1. First, traffic to Slideshare has fallen off considerably. This is despite the fact that three-quarters of all content marketers are creating more content than ever, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. To be sure not all of that content is in the form of presentations and ebooks that are found on Slideshare. 
  2. Second, Slideshare has jettisoned their editorial team, for the most part. At its apex, part of Slideshare’s appeal was its curation, including regular promotion of new and interesting presentations to the site’s home page in the “Today’s Top Slideshares,” “Featured Slideshares,” or “Trending in Social Media” sections.
  3. Third, Slideshare now appears to be making puzzlingly awful customer experience decisions. I have no idea if this is correlation or causation.
 
Slideshare’s coming passing comes on the heels of the death of Squidoo and Scribd, among others.
 
 
 

Filtering Content Curation

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We are living in an era of information overload.  So much content is shared online that curation is needed as a way to get value out of the information flood.

  • Content curation is the process of shifting through the vast abundance of content on the Internet to select the best, most relevant resource, on a specific topic or theme,  so that we can organize, manage and collate the content for ourselves and share with others.
  • Content curation is about working smarter and not harder.  Content curation is also a reflective process; as you curate resources you reflect on their value.

Why is curation important?

Curation is a life skill and an important part of being digitally literate.  Educators need to know how to curate information so they can teach students how they can curate content for research, their interests and passion.

The curation processThe curation process includes the following types of tools:

  1. News discovery tools – used select and aggregate the content.  All about saving time by feeding you the most relevant content.  Examples of news discovery tools include Feedly, Flipboard and following a hashtag in Twitter.
  2. Curation tools – used to display your content with context with organization, annotation and presentation.


Curation toolsThere are a gazilion tools you can use.; and which tools you use, and how you curate, is a personal as the tools you use to build your personal learning network.

Curation is as simple as:

  1. Find the tool(s) that you prefer to use for news discovery and for curation.
  2. Curate the content that helps you, and is helpful for others.
  3. Make it part of your routine to curate and share content.

Popular Curation toolsHere is a summary of popular curation tools:
Article source: http://www.theedublogger.com/2014/06/12/curation/

How Do I Become a Curator?

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It takes about 10 minutes to become a content curator, but patience and dedication to become a great one.

Content-Marketing-Process

“To satisfy the people’s hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individuals working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators.”

 With the right content selection and arrangement, curated sites encourage their visitors to delve deeper and grow from followers into fans. Content curation can turn a scattered collection of information bits into a seamless product story that organically builds sales interest. Discovering the right content to curate can have tremendous implications.

Simply posting to a corporate blog once a week and keeping up with Facebook is not enough, especially when everyone is doing it. Instead, businesses need to be conscious of all of the different content that is posted, and how it can be displayed to encourage click-throughs.

Another factor in content curation is the simple truth that many businesses lack the resources to produce all of their content internally. Sometimes, posting links to articles and videos that have already covered a topic creates the same effect but without the often hefty price tag of internal production.

Curation allows businesses to draw on many disparate sources to tell their story and promote their brand. The trick, of course, is knowing what, when and how to share it with your followers.

via The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation

Tips About Content Curation In Social Media

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Many brands even ignore the importance of curation and instead only talk about themselves.

content-curation-process-socialbites

  • Content Curation is the act of discovering, aggregating and posting online content that was produced by others, not yourself.
  • Curation is typically focused on a specific topic or small number of topics that are considered relevant to the audience you’re trying to reach.

Tips for curating content in social media:

1) Knowing your audience and what they’re interested in is imperative.

2) Curating content from the same popular sources everyone else is, is not effective.

3) Curating content that is suggested from sites based on what others are already sharing is not effective. (see number 2)

4) Curating unique, recent and relevant content that is targeted toward your audience’s interest, will initiate engagement by your audience.

5) Retweeting on Twitter and Sharing posts on Facebook is not curating with a strategy, it’s executing someone else’s strategy. You need to RT and share other people’s posts, but not as your entire posting strategy.

6) Hashtagging curated posts with a strategy will grow your target audience if you do it properly.

7) Important reasons you must curate quality content posts:

  1. Provide relevant, selfless value to your community
  2. Build thought leadership on topics important to your strategy
  3. To stay top of mind with your audience
  4. To spark conversations
  5. To earn the right to share and promote your stuff

8) Developing a specific curation strategy is an important part of an overall social media strategy.

9) Having enough relevant posts all day long is important.

10) Being consistent with your curation posting makes a huge difference in your results.

11) Proper content curation sparks conversations with your audience and that leads to relationships and ROI.

12) When a curated post receives a lot shares, likes and engagement, it is resonating with your audience. Schedule it several more times over the next week to maximize the effectiveness of that single post.

13) There is no choice between quantity and quality with content curation. It’s always BOTH.

14) Curated social media posts that often get the most shares and engagement are the ones that are by relatively unknown sources!

Source: 14 Things I’ve Learned About Content Curation In Social Media