There are a number of good reasons to include curating content in your content marketing strategy:
Branding and Thought Leadership
Simply put, the more targeted content you share though social media, the more followers you will attract. Twitter and LinkedIn are big sharing platforms – perfect for targeting B2B prospects. In addition to prospects following you, utilizing these outlets will drive traffic to your web site. You probably know by now how important social sharing is to the promotion of your content in search engines. While it’s been a theory for quite some time that shares on Twitter impacted search, no one knew how much until a recent study by branded3 proved tweets do affect rankings.
Discovering Great Content
The simple act of looking for content will expose you to a tremendous amount of great ideas that can lead to the creation of compelling posts. Researching for a particular topic often results in finding dozens of great posts, videos and photos to use for a current project — and to save for future projects. In many ways, discovery is replacing search.
Increasing Inbound Links To Your Site
Naturally, when you publish curated content, you will link out to the source of each curated piece of information. That link will notify the author and draw his attention to your post. He may then link back to you, sharing your content with his audience via blog, Twitter, Facebook or all of the above. This is a great way to get high-authority links back to your site. Plus, when you create valuable content by curation (whether it’s a mashup, distillation, or elevation), your readers will also link to your post on their own blogs because of its value.
Optimizing For Short-Tail Keywords
When you start pulling in content on a particular topic, you will start to pick up the most popular search terms in that area. Acquire, publish, and share trending content.
Optimizing For Long-Tail Keywords
Putting together a good aggregation piece will naturally target long-tail keywords to help draw traffic for a narrow range of searchers – your targeted prospects. You can see this when you are focusing on a particular topic like the Penguin update. Valuable long-tail keywords on that topic could be “recovering from Penguin update” or “ways to recover from Penguin.” Curated content will give you plenty of opportunities to use those terms.
Updating More Frequently
Google is now pushing recent content to the top of search results, and ranks sites based upon the frequency of new content. Content curation allows you to create a post quickly without having to pour all of your mental energy into original content. This means you can produce content for a Saturday and/or Sunday without the extra work. Or, you could use a curated piece to fill in during an emergency. Some sites take it a step further and publish more than once a day, publishing original content in the morning and curated content in the afternoon. The wildly popular blog Brain Pickings publishes about three times a day, but it’s basically all curated content.