Here’s How to Curate for Your Audience and Keep Them Coming Back
Engaging in content curation is a powerful and wonderful way to share your story, build your expertise, add value to customers and prospects, build a community, bring your voice into the world on a topic, construct a solid reputation and credibility, and have fun doing all.
If you are into relationship marketing content curation can be a wonderful experience. It is a very persuasive way for people to experience your brand and for you to engage in a unique kind of storytelling.
To be successful at this, here are a few tips:
• Think of yourself as a detective when curating content, or a bargain hunter looking for the best deals, or Indiana Jones on the hunt for treasures you can share with your audience. This is what can make curation fun, even when you are pressed for time and life is hectic.
• Never aggregate. Who needs another news feed containing everything out there on a topic, junk included?? Aggregation wastes people’s time. They have to sort and sift and make sense of it. If you do that for them by choosing only the best articles on a topic, they will love you for it. This is one of the best ways to add value for your customers and prospects, where they in turn will value you.
• Always write a short review of each article about why you like it, why people should read it, and maybe what you don’t like about the piece. Be personable. Share stories about how the article connects to your experience and the interests of your audience. Tell how you found the article and why do you think it’s important. Offer your opinion, in ways that educates but also is kind. Again this adds value for your audience.
• Make sure you tag each article with keywords. Once you have a body of articles, people need to be able to find things — and so do you. Tagging makes your curation more useful.
• Always acknowledge the author. Build relationships with those who provide great content for you. Make it a win-win experience.
• Change the headline slightly so you don’t compete with the author’s SEO. Your goal is to help build traffic to their website, not compete with them. Doing this builds traffic to both your site and theirs.
• Add a permanent post to your curation page telling people how you select your articles. This is your mini-editorial policy where you also get to state why you are curating your topic. This is where you get to share your story about why you are curating and how you go about doing it. People want to know this! An editorial statement builds trust.
• Post regularly. This also builds reliability and trust. Don’t be flaky. If you don’t have time to curate for a few days, let people know this and why.
• Don’t chase numbers — like followers, views, etc. Don’t post an article just because you know it will be popular and get lots of traffic. Do that too often and people won’t trust you. Post only the good stuff, even if it won’t be popular. The followers, views, and high scores will follow.
• Develop your voice and give yourself 4-6 months for this to mature. Be you, be authentic, be caring, be thoughtful, have an opinion, add humor, and have fun.
© 2013 Karen Dietz, PhD. All rights reserved. www.juststoryit.com
Karen Dietz, Just Story It
Curator of Just Story It – Business Storytelling on www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it
Karen Dietz
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