Content Creation vs. Content Curation

Anyone working in the social media industry whether it’s for personal use or professional use needs to know the difference between content creation and content curation. Both of these are extremely important within the social media industry and you must have sufficient understanding of each if you want to be successful within social media. You cannot do one without the other and both are necessary to drive engagement and interaction with your social media posts. Social media users should engage in content curation first and then use content curation to find other content that supports your created content. Both your created content and curated content should align with the goals and objectives of your social media initiative and organization. Aside from the goals of the organization and social media initiative, you also want to make sure that the content is relevant for your key audiences.

Content creation can be defined as the process of generating topics that appeal to your ideal buyer or audience, creating written or visual content around those ideas and making that information available to your ideal audience as a blog, social media post, YouTube video or any other format. Content creation is not specifically used in social media, it can also apply to writing newspaper articles, magazine editorials, movie reviews or anything else that requires the writer to deliver original content to its audience. There are many different goals content creation can be used to achieve, so it is important social media know how to create the right content to achieve their goals. If your goal is to provide a sense of community and create brand awareness you might want to create posts that are integrated with videos, testimonials from current or previous customers and even blog post that promote your brand or the products and services it offers. Providing good, strong content is one of the most important things you can do to build the credibility and popularity of your brand.

Content curation is much different than content creation, however, it is just as important to creating and maintaining a successful social media account, blog site or even personal website. Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. The overall goal of content curation is to provide your audiences with useful information that not only resonates with them but also builds on their perception that your brand online is a valuable resource. The social media users, bloggers or anyone else you decide to curate content from should closely align with the values and beliefs your brand currently possess. You want the content to provide support and validity to the content you have already created for your social media account or blog post. One thing many social media users are unaware of is the fact that you don’t always have to share the content you have curated, you can also use this information to monitor and listen to the social media activities of your competitors.