The Essential Guide to Content Curation

Museums curate works of art. We marketers curate digital content.

Though our link shares may not be artistic contributions, the idea of curation is at least the same at museums and online: We’re all seeking only the best material to pass along to our patrons, customers, fans, or followers.

Finding and sharing exquisite content has never been more valuable. With the vast volume of content being shared every day, it’s harder than ever to sift through and find what’s most valuable to you. 

People love being told what’s good to read or essential to see. Curators are the tastemakers of the modern creative landscape.

With that in mind, we’ve collected some ways to get started with content curation and to do so as efficiently and expertly as possible.

What is content curation?

Content curation is sorting through a large amount of web content to find the best, most meaningful bits and presenting these in an organized, valuable way.

Social media users are looking for a one-stop shop in a world of nearly infinite content – most social media platforms offer that. However, it is also helpful to note what content curation is not.

Curation is not aggregation.

What’s the difference? How the content is collected.

Content aggregation relies on automation, using algorithms to find content – it’s what the social platforms do. Content curation features handpicked content, often introduced with a snippet of copy from the curator. When performed correctly, content curation can add a lot of value.

Aggregation is algorithmic. Curation is handpicked.

The human element of curation is a huge source of its value. Algorithms can do a great job at surfacing stories that meet certain standards, but there will always be posts that fall through the cracks. Handpicked human collections can find content that might resonate outside of standard measuring tools, and the end product of a handpicked curation will always be unique.

4 benefits of content curation

Here are some of the significant benefits to a good content curation strategy. These benefits include:

• You improve your relationship with the creators, publishers, and brands whose content you share.
• You grow your authority on a subject (provided the curation is top-notch).
• You add quality content to your site or timeline and create a great resource for others.
• You save time by creating content yourself from scratch.

Examples of content curation

Content curation can work itself out in a number of different ways. Depending on your marketing focus and content strategy, one of these three curating methods—or multiple methods—could be a fit.

Curate content in a weekly blog post

You may be familiar with these link roundups. They’re simply posts that collect helpful resources from around the web on a given topic (the very definition of curation).

Curate content in an email newsletter

This is my preferred method of curation for Buffer’s newsletter. I put in the latest content from the blog, one trend from our social media manager to give our audience something actionable to take away, and three or four of the most relevant social media news of the week.

Curation is big in the newsletter space. We’ve highlighted a few of our favorite newsletters before – Morning Brew, Lia Haberman to name a few, and they all incorporate content curation in one way or another.

Here’s an example of one from Substack newsletter, as seen on that highlights content from around the web as well as the other interesting links they’ve found elsewhere.

Curate content on your social media profiles

On social media, curation is likely to be part of the mix of content you share. You’ll still post personal updates, brand mentions, and miscellaneous other content – curation would simply join the schedule.

Girl Power Marketing is a fantastic example of content curation done right on social media. Founder Annie-Mai Hodge pioneered the “social media updates” format, curating the top news of the week on social media from around the web in one-line snippets.

How to curate content as efficiently and expertly as possible

If curating content is something you’d love to try for your marketing efforts, you’re likely wondering about the one big hurdle: time. How much time does quality content curation take?

Certainly, a time investment is involved in doing it right (as with most things done well). But don’t let this dissuade you from getting started. There are a number of resources, tools, and tricks that help make the curation process even easier. Here’s what’s involved.

Source content from unique places

Off-the-radar spots are often quite good – there’s content on those sites that your audience may not have seen before, which adds an immediate boost of credibility for you and a boost of value your readers.

Spots like Feedly, subreddits, and Quora are some solid options. In addition to these places, there are some common, popular sites that you can also use to sift through new stories.

Try a Google News search to see what current stories are bubbling up and might be of interest. Also, content aggregators like Alltop can be good resources for finding new types of content to read and share.

Of course, the social networks themselves can also be quality sources of content. Specifically, you can dig down into communities or advanced topic searches to find gems that are specific to the areas you want to target and curate. There are many ways to create swipe files in and out of social media to sort your ideas so you can revisit them when you need inspiration. Inside your email, you can filter the RSS feeds and newsletters into their own curation folders.

As you can see, there are a wide variety of sources. The big job is to narrow them down to what suits you and your audience best.

Read what you find

I can admit to being tempted to skim a story and share it – or skip the skimming altogether and jump straight to sharing! There’s just so much content to read and so little time.

However, there are some pitfalls to sharing without reading.

• The story could be of far lower quality than you anticipated, which would reflect poorly on your tastes and opinions.
• The story could have a misleading headline. It could take an entirely different angle than you expected.
• The words, language, and visuals may not be in line with your brand standards or policies.
• You might be asked to give your opinion on the article.
• Many people view it as a shady practice or even dishonest.

Take the extra time to read the valuable posts you’ve saved. There are a handful of tools that make reading a bit quicker: read-it-later apps like Pocket or text to speech tools for the audio-inclined like Speechify.

Pick out your favorites

As you read, make note of the stories that really stood out to you and that you’d like to share. There are a number of different ways of organizing these, ranging from old-school to highly automated.

1. Use a content curation tool to store your best finds.
2. Compose your curation post or email as you find the content. Keep an ongoing draft.
3. Create a bookmark system. Use your browser’s built-in saving mechanism for a curated folder of content.
4. Automate your best finds with a simple workflow in Zapier 
5. Share right away. Skip the saving step and go right to sharing (more on that below).

Depending on what you’ve decided for your curation strategy—blog posts, newsletters, social, something else, a combination—you can jump right in at this point. Sometimes, after searching for the right content and reading over it, sharing can be the easiest part.

Batch and schedule: The shortcut to social curation

If you choose to share your curation on social media (great idea!), you have a number of tools at your disposal and one neat time-saving trick: Batch and schedule.

I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to believe that I used to share all my content on social media one post at a time, direct from the native client, whenever I happened to be logged in. There are simpler, more efficient ways of doing things now.

Batch your curation

Set aside time in your schedule to search, find, read, and collect at once. I know I’m always quite tempted to dip in and out of my various curation sources like RSS and newsletters, but that’s never the quickest way.

Schedule time each day, every other day, or once a week. Then, sit down and do it all. Curating in real-time is seldom a good idea unless it meets a very specific need for your brand or strategy.

If you happen to come across a particularly fine piece of content outside your curation batch time, have some safeguards in place. Linda Dessau recommends emailing the link to yourself, adding it to a bookmarks folder, or using tools like Pocket or saved.io.

Schedule your curation

The potential pitfall of collecting all your shareable content at a set time is overwhelming your audience by sharing it all at once. Scheduling tools like Buffer were built to address this pain point. You can share great content whenever you want, regardless of when you discover it.

We’ve written in the past about the best amount to post to social networks, so you might consider these tips when you’re building out your batch and schedule.

• Facebook: 1–2 posts/day
• Instagram Stories: 2 Instagram Stories/day
• Instagram in-feed posts (carousels, Reels, etc.): 1–2 posts/day
• TikTok: 1–4 posts/day
• Twitter (now X): 3–4 posts/day
• LinkedIn: 1 post/day
• Pinterest: 15–25 pins/day
• YouTube: 1 video/week
• YouTube Shorts: 1–3 videos/week

Finally, whenever you schedule content on social media, don’t just set it and forget it. Check back for reactions so you can keep the conversation going.

Your turn

What does your content curation process look like?

I love a good curation outpost—either on social, on a blog, or in a newsletter. If you have one that you’d like to share, I’d be super keen to hear about it and see what you’ve put together. Feel free to leave a link in the comments, and if you’re willing, to let us in on a curation secret or two!