At our Orlando marketing agency, we know we live in an era where content is key. Good content can help engage your community, keep your business relevant in the eyes of your audience and can even impact your business’s ranking in search. But, good content doesn’t come without a cost, and even within that framework, different types of content generate different types of results.
However, one of the questions we come across most frequently in talking about content is whether it’s more efficient to create content, or to curate it. First, let’s discuss the difference between content creation vs content curation.

Content Creation

Content created by your marketing team or business helps you get your own perspectives into the hands of your audience. This is typically comprised of things like original tweets, blogs, Facebook posts, infographics and all other content that someone creates on behalf of your business that you could potentially share via social media, website or email marketing.

The benefit of this type of content is that if it’s shared, it’ll directly point others back to your business. Some studies show that original content is more helpful in creating conversions. This may be because original content about your area of expertise helps to build trust with the audience who will ultimately purchase from your company.

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However, content creation can take significant effort to maintain. Many people start businesses and plan to incorporate blogs, only to find that blogging takes a lot of time and resources, resources you may not have if your business is working with a small staff. Still, these businesses seek to continue to create content in order to help maintain visibility and establish trust with their audience.

Content Curation

Content curation is the act of sharing content created by others. This might mean an interesting article, a great visual, an interesting tweet or even just a funny gif.

Sites like Twitter make it extremely easy to share others’ content, but even sites like LinkedIn fill their content base by relying mostly on content created by others. For companies that primarily curate content, people can come to rely on your business as a great way to seek content on a variety of relevant topics that reach your target audience.

Content curation typically takes less effort than content creation, but it’s still important to take the time to read each piece of content to make sure it’s completely on brand, and proposes an opinion you’re willing to support.

Posts linking to third-party content tend to get more clicks. Realistically, the best content on the web probably comes from large media organizations with high brand recognition, so it makes sense that links from smaller sites might not have as many clicks.

Content Creation and Content Curation: The Sweet Spot

Many effective strategies apply a mix of each of these. Businesses can supplement some original content with content from third parties in order to help keep the original content flowing. This is a solid balance between the struggles of maintaining original content and the more passive engagement of curating content.

In terms of conversions, companies that balance both types of content seem to generate the most conversions, according to Convince and Convert.[quote]Simply curating content doesn’t do enough to generate interest in your own brand, while creating all your own content comes across as self-promotion.[/quote] Companies should aim to link to others’content 50-75% of the time. This means that in additional to posting original content on your feeds, you should also be following your favorite companies, brands and influencers, and be willing to share their ideas in order to help your business become a go-to spot for the most current and up-to-date content in your industry.

The team at our Orlando ad agency can show you numerous ways to use content to help generate conversions for your business. Contact us, and let us show help show you the sweet spot for content creation and curation that will help generate the most conversions.