The Power of Social Media Content Curation
Published on 18.01.2026 by Chizoba T
Regardless of the content marketing strategy you employ or the platform you prefer, you are likely to face the challenge of consistently creating high-quality content that meets the needs of your target audience. From facing writer’s block to handling social media crises and showing the ROI of your content, there are a lot of challenges you will face.
One way to address these challenges is to leverage other people’s content to drive engagement with your lead generation content strategy. From educational thought leadership content on LinkedIn to hilarious memes on Twitter and employee advocacy content, there are tons of content you can use to take your content marketing to the next level, in what is known as content curation.
There are also questions about the effectiveness and ethical side of content curation. In this article, we answer these questions and help you create a good content curation strategy.
What is Content Curation?
Content curation involves finding, choosing, organizing, and sharing content from external sources that you have no right to and cannot claim. Content curation is different from content creation, as there is no need to create original content. Instead, you leverage other people’s content, such as blog posts, videos, and articles, to supplement your own original content and provide value to your target audience.
For instance, you can post a link to industry articles or news on your Facebook page or tweet a quote from thought leaders. In most cases, permission is needed before posting curated content. You may also be required to give credit to the original creator or owner. The curated content can then be shared through various channels, such as social media platforms, websites, email, and YouTube short or long videos.
Pros of Content Curation
With audiences preferring to feel part of a larger community, you can use content curation to meet their expectations. Here are several benefits of content curation:
Time and Resource-Saving
An effective content curation strategy can help your business save significant resources that you would otherwise have spent on content creation. The whole content creation process is usually faster and less labour-intensive compared to content curation. An example of a brand that does that effectively is Buffer, the social media management tool. The brand saw an increase in engagement when it began curating content in its industry rather than creating it.
By curating content from reputable sources, you can ensure that you have a steady flow of fresh content relevant to your audience without investing a lot of time and resources.
Position Yourself as an Authority
As noted earlier, content curation involves sourcing content from other sources. When you take the time to find high-quality content, you can position yourself as an authority in your niche. When you consistently find and share high-quality content and credit the creators, you can build essential networks with influencers in your niche.
According to a Demand Gen Report, 78% of buyers consider curated content a good indicator of a company's level of expertise. For instance, a fitness brand that shares curated content written by a gym instructor on the best exercises to lose belly fat will be seen as authoritative and gain your audience's trust.
Higher Engagement Level
When sharing curated content, you can get a variety of relevant, personalized, and diverse content that caters to your audience’s needs. This is, therefore, a promising approach to increasing engagement and loyalty among your target audience. An example of a brand that uses curated content is Red Bull, which curates content across culture, lifestyle, and sport through its Red Bulletin magazine.
The brand doesn’t focus only on energy drinks and offers content that adds value to its target audience. This enables them to captivate their readers, resulting in stronger relationships with the brand.
Increase Customers’ Trust.
When your business curates high-quality content, it delivers value to its target customers, especially if the content helps them solve a problem or find an answer. You can also show your audience that you value them rather than just promoting your content. This can save time with your audience as you do the legwork of finding and ensuring the quality of content. It shows them that you understand their needs.
Determining the Content to Curate
While content curation comes with various benefits as outlined above, this doesn't mean you should curate all your content. You need a good balance between original and curated content to remain authentic while enjoying the benefits of curated content.
When determining the amount of curated content to consider, factor in the volume and frequency of the content based on your audience's preferences and needs, and plan for the available resources. You can determine the amount of the content to curate by:
Using Analytics
Analytics can provide essential insights into your audience's response to both original and curated content. Check various engagement metrics, such as time spent on a page, likes, and comments. These metrics can show you if the content is resonating with your audience.
Team Size
You also need to consider how big your content team is and whether they have all the necessary resources. If you have a small team with limited capacity, curating content can be a good strategy because you will be leveraging other professionals' content to provide your audience with important information.
But if you have enough resources and a large content creation team, you shouldn't have a problem creating large volumes of curated content. This will provide you with a good mix of different content and maintain your brand voice.
The key thing is to ensure that you have a good balance that understands the audience’s preferences and the available resources. Make sure you regularly evaluate the performance metrics of different content and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Types of Curated Content
Curated content can be divided into five different categories:
- Aggregation. This involves curating relevant content on a single topic. This is a curation method that is available for purchase or use.
- Distillation. This aims to eliminate noise from a topic and minimize the core concept. It considers the key points of a topic while simplifying them at different stages of the buying process.
- Elevation. This content curation strategy involves analyzing a large volume of data to identify trends and insights. The aim is to create an idea, hypothesis, or theory using a few similar content pieces.
- Mashups. This type of content curation merges several similar pieces to get the original viewpoint. For instance, you can identify gaps in your industry and present a unique perspective.
- Chronology. This involves curating several content pieces to create a timeline or storyline. The goal may be to show how a particular theory or concept evolves into a complete story or content. It can also illustrate how the different pieces of content play a role in the endpoint.
Steps in Effectively Curating Content
A common mistake brands make when curating content is assuming it's just about finding and sharing content. However, this is not true; it requires proper planning and a good strategy that will add value to your target audience. To do that, follow these steps:
Determine Your Target Audience
Before you begin content curation, determine who your target audience is and what their interests and preferences are. You can leverage tools such as Google Analytics and native social media tools to get insights into the topics that resonate well with your target audience. For instance, BuzzFeed has a Facebook page titled "Tasty Food Recipes" that curates quick meal ideas for its followers.
Find High-Quality and Relevant Content
You want to ensure that the source of your curated content is from reputable influencers, top publications, and well-known thought leaders. This will ensure that you are not only providing value to your target readers but also establishing yourself as a credible source. An example of a brand that does this well is the HubSpot blog, which curates articles from top publishers and shares valuable insights with its audience.
Use Content and Commentary to Add Value
A good content curation strategy should involve adding value to the content being curated. This could be by sharing some key takeaways and unique perspectives on your curated content. It can be a good strategy for sharing your expertise and building your audience's trust. An example of a blog that does that is Neil Patel’s blog, where he posts curated articles and adds his expert analysis, providing value to his readers.
Best Practices in Content Creation
When curating content, make sure you follow these best practices:
Curate Content in Your Niche
You need to ensure your content aligns with your current content strategy and branding. For instance, if you want to curate SpaceX content, you can share Wired or NASA content. But if you are in the workout niche, sharing SpaceX content will seem out of place.
Therefore, ensure you are curating content in your niche. You can begin by creating a list of sources relevant to you, including trade publications, news outlets, partners, and other industries in your niche. After determining your possible source, you can start curating their content.
Only Curate from Reputable Sources
After you have curated content, your reputation will only be as good as that of your source. This is why you need to ensure you curate content only from reputable sources. This is particularly important in the age of deepfakes that are used to spread misinformation. Otherwise, if your target audience realizes that you are spreading fake news, they might not forgive you for sharing misinformation.
Take time to go through the articles, images, or videos you are curating, looking for any red flags. Is it an article? Does it make sense, or are there relevant studies to back it? If you notice that the content references only one source and focuses heavily on pitching one product, it's an indication that your audience will see it as untrustworthy.
Visit the source page or website to determine the people behind the news or company, and the amount of information you can collect about them. When you realize the information isn't from a credible source, don't share it.
Give Credit Even After Personalizing
Even after you have curated content, you still need to add a personal touch by adding your perspective. This could be done by expressing your opinion on the curated content or by adding your perspective. Doing that ensures you add value to your target audience and make the content more appealing.
Remember that just as you work hard to find high-quality, well-researched content, they have also worked hard to create it. Therefore, when curating content, you need to credit the original creators by sharing a link to the original work. This will show that you respect their work, and it can also help you build better relationships with key industry players.
Create a Curated Content Pipeline
You need to ensure that you make curated content part of your calendar, alongside your other content pieces. Have a structure for how you will discover and share content. You can share the curated content once or several times a week or a month. No matter your chosen frequency, make sure you add a sense of anticipation among your audience.
You can use social listening to discover content and create streams of the latest articles shared by each source and ongoing trends. Through social listening, you can also find the topics generating the highest engagement on social media. This will provide insights into the most engaging content to share and which isn't.
Combine Curated Content with Employee Advocacy
If you are already running an employee advocacy program, you understand the struggle you are likely to face in maintaining a steady stream of content. This is despite the regular need for fresh content. To save on time and resources, you can use curated content for your employee advocacy program. Additionally, employee advocates would be glad to share curated content as it positions them as thought leaders.
Therefore, curated content is one of the best ways of ensuring a steady flow of employee advocacy content. When you offer your advocates new and interesting content, it can boost their engagement. This can be in the form of thought leadership, industry news, or a game-changing release from your partners. Your employees will love the opportunity to share captivating and thought-provoking content.
Content Planning and Organization
To ensure a consistent flow of curated content, you need an editorial calendar that delivers fresh content regularly. You can mark your calendar with different types of content, such as articles, videos, and infographics, ensuring your audience has a diverse mix.
Add Visual Elements
When curating content, you can add compelling visuals such as videos and images to the curated content to improve engagement and capture the attention of users. With statistics showing that visual content drives the highest engagement, this is a good strategy for making outstanding visual content. In fact, some Instagram influencer accounts, such as NatGeo, focus on curating stunning images that captivate their followers.
Encourage Your Audience to Participate
Good content curation should encourage the audience to share their opinions, ask questions, and participate actively. This can stimulate conversations and ensure a sense of community around your brand. An example of a brand that does this well is TED-Ed, whose YouTube channel creates educational animations that encourage viewer participation by inviting them to share their thoughts and comments.
How to Share Curated Content With Your Community
After you have found content to curate, you will need to deliver it effectively to ensure it reaches your target audience in their preferred format and channel. Some of the top ways to distribute curated content are:
Newsletters
This is one of the oldest but most effective methods of delivering curated content. When using it, you need to publish your top content in a periodic or regular newsletter before sharing it with subscribers via their email inboxes. Using this approach can ensure a personalized touch and give you better reach within your community.
Activity Feed
Another effective way to get a steady stream of curated content is through the activity feed. When you add curated posts, updates, and articles to your feed, you can have evergreen content. Your audience will be able to easily access the latest curated content and take part in the conversation from the activity feed.
Community Groups
Another effective way of delivering curated content is through digital communities that are already organized into sub-communities and groups. When doing so, ensure the content is tailored to the community's unique needs and preferences. By doing that, you will have a highly relevant digital community that meets the needs of the subcommunity.
Blogs
One of the most common ways of sharing curated content is through blogs. This method is especially popular because it enables in-depth discussions and topic exploration on the community's website. You can find various blogs that offer tutorials and tips on skills, such as photo editing, to enhance the value they provide their audiences.
Best Tools and Software For Content Creation
When you have powerful tools, you can save the time you would have spent on content creation and deliver top content that meets the needs of your target audience. Here are the top tools to consider for content curation:
This crucial tool makes bookmarking easier by letting you save videos, webpages, and articles for later use. It can, therefore, be an essential tool for creating a personalized library for content curation, accessible from any device. Pocket has a recommendation function that suggests similar content you are learning based on your reading preferences, expanding your horizon of knowledge.
Feedly
Feedly is another great content curation tool that lets you find, organize, and share content from top sources in one place. The tool features an easy-to-use interface that enables you to follow relevant news sites, industry influencers, and blogs. The tool includes an RSS feed that notifies you when content is published, so you don't miss any updates.
Hootsuite
The Hootsuite content library is another excellent tool to make your content creation seamless. This is because it enables users to curate and even schedule their social media content directly from the platform. Users can categorize content by theme or topic, or organize it in a calendar view. The tool also offers automated publishing, ensuring maximum efficiency.
In addition to making the curation process easier, Hootsuite will also provide important insights into the performance of your curated content. It will show you various metrics, such as engagement rate, shares, and clicks, so you can determine what resonates more with your audience. You can then use this content stimulation to optimize your content.
Curata
Another great content curation tool that will streamline the whole process from finding content to its publication is Curata. You can use it to find the relevant content, videos, infographics, and articles using their keyword search and advanced filtering options. The tool also includes customizable publishing workflows, enabling users to create curated content for publication across different platforms.
Final Thoughts
In the ever-evolving field of content marketing, you need to have a strategy that will put you ahead of the competition. With the need for regular content publication, you need a way of avoiding burnout. One effective method is content creation. However, when doing it, this should be more than just reposting other people’s content and attributing it.
It should involve a well-crafted strategy to ensure you share high-quality content that positions you as a thought leader in your niche. Such content will also help you build trust with your target audience. If you are wondering how to find, organize, and share content, our detailed guide will help you do so.