Creating effective content on your site is important, but sharing curated content is also an excellent way to enhance your own website. Most marketing experts recommend using a balanced combination of both techniques in order to create the most effective website.
Content Creation versus Content Curation
The average company spends most of its time creating articles for its website, and with good reason. Effective content means people will think of you when they need information on your product or service. Plus, the content is yours and yours alone. However, when using only social media to share your own content, it can make your business seem self-centered and a little too promotional. In addition, it can lead to opinions being repeated, overheard, and repeated again along the way.
Curating content can ease that problem, because it allows you to directly connect to the content of other businesses—content you didn’t really invest in. Let’s face it: your content is geared towards making sales, which is a good thing. However, curating content is a good public relations tool because it tells your readers that you care about them getting the information they are interested in and really want. Its purpose is to find and share content that your readers will be interested in. It is also a good way to get a lot of clicks, because your readers stay interested. However, linking to other websites doesn’t result in making any conversions.
Each of these techniques has a specific purpose, along with certain advantages and disadvantages. So using them in the right combination is critical.
Achieving the Perfect Balance
There are plusses to content curation and content creation, but how does a business determine the right balance that will work best to promote its product or service? Tristan Handy from Convince & Convert, a US-based consulting company, used data by Argyle Social to consider how businesses share content and the percentage of curated versus created content that worked best. According to their data, two-thirds of all businesses linked to other businesses’ websites more often than they did to their own. 30% linked to other sites at least 75% of the time, while 13% of the businesses linked back to their own sites at least 75% of the time.
Not surprisingly, these two approaches each produced totally different results. Businesses that posted to third-party sites received 33% more clicks than those that posted to their own site. Links to created content resulted in a click-to-conversion rate that was 54% higher. Here are some other important numbers to highlight:
- When a company links to other sites at least 75% of the time, it results in many clicks, but only a few actual conversions.
- When a company links to other websites 50% to 75% of the time, there are fewer clicks, but more conversions.
- When a company links at least 50% of the time to its own content, there are even fewer clicks without an increase in conversions.
- Top businesses link to their websites approximately 40% of the time, which is considered the ideal situation and one you should strive for.
Curating Content
So, you’ve decided to curate content, but where do you get the information and websites to link to? If you have a B2B company and communicate regularly with your audience members in your day-to-day dealings, this can be an excellent source of information. Content can also come from news aggregators, or even from employees themselves. There are a variety of places where you can get information.
Once you start sharing the information, make sure you analyze how well each of the clicks is doing. Which posts result in the highest number of shares, clicks, and comments? Which ones are being ignored? Analyzing the statistics allows you to make an informed decision on your next course of action and help you improve on the areas that need it.
