When It Comes To Content, Creating Beats Curating

In social media, content is king. The content you share online ultimately determines your social media success. If you aren’t sharing relevant, engaging content with your fans and followers you aren’t supplying value or giving your audience a reason to connect with you online. Good content is the backbone of any social media strategy, and it is impossible to excel in the social sphere without it. So where does good content come from? There are two options: you create it, or you curate it.

Content is the currency of the social web, and creating good, original content is always the best way to go. However, creating valuable and compelling content may present a challenge for many businesses. Therefore, more and more brands are trying to establish themselves through content curation – rather than creation.

Marketing expert Rohit Bhargava defines a content curator as:”someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.”

According to a recent eMarketer report, 85% of marketers curate content in order to establish thought leadership. However, while content curation is a good way of supplying your online audiences with relevant content, sharing someone else’s content does not make you a thought leader.

Time is money, and since creating good content takes a lot more time than curating it, many businesses and marketers are sharing curated content and confusing the resulted attention with thought leadership. There are billions of content pieces shared on the Internet daily, and sifting through the noise to find the “needle in the haystack” can be difficult and superfluous. Therefore, content curators are valued for what they discover and share – that’s it. They are not valued for their own perspectives on a subject matter, and thus cannot be considered thought leaders.

According to “Thought Leadership Marketing is an Oxymoron” there are three key tenants of thought leadership. They are as follows: thought leadership is recognized, thought leadership is expansive, thought leadership is pushing boundaries.

Content curation, though valuable, is not a marketing shortcut. Your prospects connect with you online because they want to learn more about you. They want to know your views on a certain industry. However, when you simply curate the content of other’s your audiences doesn’t learn anything about you, your brand, or your thinking. Curating content doesn’t set you apart, because everyone else is doing the same thing. If you want to stand out and reach your audience you need to create content – not just curate it.