For businesses with an online presence, content marketing has become an important tool to help attract customers, form relationships, and generate leads and sales. While most people know about creating original content as a form of marketing, you may be less familiar with the concepts of content curation and aggregation.
In this piece, we’ll provide an introduction to these strategies, and give examples of how and where they might be used. We’ll also tell you about the pros and cons of each one to help you decide if they might be right for your business. Finally, we’ll reveal some of the best content curation and aggregation tools available, along with how you can use them within your WordPress website.
An Introduction to Content Curation and Aggregation
Put simply, content curation involves taking content from external sources and presenting it to your readers in a different way. While all curated content must be properly attributed to its original source, you can add things such as commentary, images, or headlines to make it more valuable to your target audience.
On the other hand, content aggregation typically doesn’t involve adding commentary or other elements. You simply pull existing content (either your own or others’), and present it without making changes. Content aggregation can take many forms, but is often automated based on keywords or tags.
The age of content marketing has arguably introduced increasing pressure on businesses to provide their readers with a steady stream of relevant and interesting information, and constantly creating quality original content could be infeasible for many small websites. This leaves a gap to be filled – enter content curation and aggregation.
Content Curation
Content curation can appear in many forms. In fact, you may already be doing it without realizing it! If you share links on social media platforms and add you own thoughts or comments, you can consider yourself a curator. For example, this Facebook post doesn’t have a lot of original content, but can still be considered curation:
Content Aggregation
Similarly to curation, content aggregation also has lots of different forms. The context you’re probably most familiar with is Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), where content is collected, sorted, and displayed based on the search term you enter:
Many marketing experts say that content curation is superior to aggregation and should therefore be the major focus. However, both techniques come with their own benefits and challenges. Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons.
