A FACT:  Social media and content marketing require incredibly hard work if you are going to experience the full benefits that can be achieved by marketing and promoting your business in this medium.  Cathy Mellett

Valuable content and yes a ready stream of content for your social media networks is a challenge for most businesses and professionals.

It takes time and effort to produce blog posts, construct Facebook engaging content and generate powerful tweets for twitter.  This when you are already trying to manage your already overflowing to do list.  Overwhelming is a word that I often hear.

Social media and content marketing require incredibly hard work if you are going to experience the full benefits that can be achieved by marketing and promoting your business in this medium.

As a result of businesses and professionals coming to this realization, many may turn to content curation as their primary source of content generation for their social media networks.   In today’s world, there are many sources online with great content – so why not share this content with your audience?

Perhaps we should explore the pros and cons of content creation vs. content curation.

CONTENT CREATION

What are the benefits of creating your own content?

  • The content you create is exclusively yours -your experience, your knowledge, your testimonials, your case studies.
  • Via the release of your own content, you will build an authority status on you particular subject matter.
  • Consumers or potential customers who enjoyed reading your content will need to come to you as the source of knowledge, and may return for more information or to ask you some further questions.
  • The value you offer will be unique to your audience and as a result you will be able to generate a loyal set of followers who are being constantly exposed to your brand message.
  • Through your experience sharing, you will be able to directly demonstrate your business’ knowledge and expertise.
  • The content you generate can be optimized for your search criteria and targeted keywords.  The result – improving your business’s search engine rankings.
  • As the words are generated by you,  the tone and personality of your business can be highlighted in your unique articles.
  • Your content can work toward addressing your business’ unique goals and objectives for that particular social network or medium.

So what are the con’s – what keeps some businesses from generating their own content on a regular basis?

Here are some of my perceived obstacles to original content creation.

  • It is time consuming.
  • There is pressure to be constantly generating new content and business owners are already busy.
  • Social media success is a journey and real measurable success through content marketing is not achieved overnight.
  • Then there is the expense.  Professional video creation, great graphics and imagery. All of this can be expensive.
  • Publishing your content on line could within certain industries and professions open up your organisation to criticism or questioning.

So what alternatives can we find that still provides us with content- perhaps we could use  content generated by others and not by us?

CONTENT CURATION

This entails finding relevant content pertaining to your business, posting it to your social media networks.

What would the benefits be of content curation?

  • There are many reliable sources of great content.
  • It takes considerably less time to curate content than to create unique content.
  • As you are not generating your own content you are probably going to share or post information more regularly.
  • Social media is about sharing other peoples content- so that must be a good thing?
  • There are many tools that are available to make curating content incredibly efficient.

So perhaps this sounds like the answer to those that are time poor or is it really a solution?

  • Curated content will never showcase your capabilities, expertise or experience.
  • In sharing other peoples content you may inadvertently be promoting the competition.
  • Your content sharing calendar may become dependent on the content stream being generated by others.
  • Engagement statistics may be lower as the stats may revert to the original source of the content.
  • Curated content may not be targeted to your business objectives.

SO WHAT IS THE ANSWER TO THIS DILEMMA?

In my opinion, creating unique content for your social media channels and networks vs. curating relevant content for sharing and engaging are both valid approaches to ensuring your have a constant feed of entertaining and readable content.  You may want to experiment with your social networking site and obtain an optimum ratio that works well with your audience.

As a rule of thumb, I would highly recommend that your social site is updated with at least one piece of new and unique content each week.  Curated content is then utilised to fill the remaining content release funnel.

This will allow you to provide your audience with a healthy and manageable mix of uniquely created content and curated content  and therefore maximize your ability to consistently provide value to your current and potential client base whilst also demonstrating what your business or profession is all about.

If you have any further question please give Cathy Mellett of Social Media Company Net Branding a call.