A recent survey from Livefyre for the second quarter of 2013 found that there is a “widespread positive impact” when it comes to integrating social curation with real-time applications. 

The most popular platform for doing this was unsurprisingly found to be Twitter, with many marketers stating that tweets are often featured on their site and mobile apps. In fact, a huge 82% of businesses said that they have managed to increase engagement thanks to curating social posts about their brand and products.

What is Content Curation?

Content curation should make up a part of any good content marketing strategy and is simply finding & sharing industry-relevant content that is extremely useful to your audience. This fills in the gaps in the time that are left in between posting the content that you create on social media and so on.

Sharing high-quality content ensures that you are giving your audience a constant supply of decent material that relates to your industry, whether it’s about products, latest news, industry-relevant techniques and so on.

As the pyramid illustrates, it’s not always possible to publish your own content all of the time. This will be because of budgets and time constraints for the most part. However, content curation takes very little in the way of time and effort, so is useful for keeping your audience engaged when you have nothing to publish of your own.

Internal Social Curation

It’s not just other industry content that curation is all about though and the Livefyre survey found that real-time social content can help businesses to promote products. Social curation is about showing real-time content such as the latest tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram pics etc. on the company website.

This is thought to increase user engagement and 88% of those questioned confirmed this. Only 5% of those asked said that they had seen no benefit to having real-time social curation solutions on their website.

54% said that they had connected directly with their audience and overall, 73% of businesses said that they use social curation. 

“One of the major challenges that marketers face today is creating great content,” said Jordan Kretchmer, Founder and CEO of Livefyre. 

“People are talking about your brand every day. Social curation enables marketers to tap into what people are already saying about your brand on social networks and then use it to promote their products in an effective, authentic way.”

Twitter Leads the Way

93% of those that carry out social curation use Twitter opposed to 89% of Facebook business users; 50% use YouTube content, whilst 41% use Instagram. 73% of companies use social applications to help them with this such as sharing widgets, live blogs and live chat apps. 

Of those, 41% said that they have seen a marked increase in traffic to their site since implementing these social apps.

“Increased user engagement and time-on-site translates to more brand impressions and deeper brand loyalty,” Kretchmer went on to say. 

“By integrating social applications into your website, mobile apps and advertisements, you can significantly impact how consumers discover and evaluate your products. Marketers who aren’t yet thinking about ways to socialize their owned properties need to start thinking about ways to build community around their brand.”

Social Applications

The study relates to Livefyre’s products insomuch as they provide a free comments app that allows users to ‘listen’ and chat in real time in the comments section of a blog post. Other examples include social login plugins, Twitter feed widgets and so on.

These serve different functions but all make engagement and interaction somewhat more measurable. 

When it comes to content, it’s often frustrating for businesses that know it’s not going to work if they just go on about how great their products or they are all day. Nothing puts a social audience off quicker than blatant self-promotion. By using curation, businesses can maintain a good, strong presence, whilst listening to what is being said about their brand on social and reacting accordingly.

Think about how often you retweet, or share an interesting article on Facebook, or Pin a beautiful photo of something connected to your industry on Pinterest. All of this and more make up content creation and should be included in your marketing strategy from the beginning.