If a Machine Does it, It’s Not Curation
Curation serves an important purpose in brand marketing. It tells your audience that you’re not only interested in promoting your brand, but care about sharing useful information with them.
After all, brands aspire to share content of relevance and meaningful value to their audience, regardless of whether they’ve created it themselves or sourced it from a third-party.
Given its importance, it does not make sense to leave content curation to a software.
The way a content curation app works is, you provide keywords and phrases related to the topics around which you want to discover blogs and articles, and the app uses natural language processing algorithms to comb the World Wide Web, and puts relevant articles before you.
You may feel like it works ‘well enough’ but effective content curation is about selecting the best content, not just settling for relevant content.
Humans can do what algorithms cannot : appreciate the content, and make both educated and intuitive decisions on how much the audience is likely to benefit from it.
A curation machine may excel at finding a large number of articles relevant to the keywords/phrases.
However, when you sift through the content, you may find very few articles that you actually wish to share with your audience.
Content curation apps may also post links directly to your social media pages after a cursory ‘OK’ from you.
They do save you a lot of time in the process, but they don’t do curation very well. You could be missing out on some authoritative, interesting or off-beat articles that you may have discovered if you had curated the content yourself.
Another issue with direct posting of content curated by a software is that you never get the opportunity to add your own opinions/perspectives, and you can’t explain to your audience why you’ve chosen the content (good content curators often add one or more sentences on why they are sharing it).
That makes it difficult to facilitate the appreciation of the content by your audience, who may not have the chance to read it otherwise.
To maximize advantage from curation, it is best if you or someone from your team handles it. Software and tools can aid this process by organizing and sharing your curated content, saving you both time and effort.
With Kurator curation becomes part of what you do. You simply curate your interest and record your thoughts while the ideas are still fresh. Click here to see a demo and get Kurator.