Curating your content can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful online content business.
For many content creators, the curation of their content is not as important as the actual production and promotion of their content. However, content creation is much more than that and includes pre-production, production, post-production, promotion, repurposing, and,of course, curation.
Content curation is vital for providing a great user experience for your audience, whether they be watchers, listeners, or readers of your content. User experience cannot be understated in the digital world. Suppose a user finds consuming content in any form too taxing or complicated. In that case, they may
spend their time elsewhere in the vastness of the online world and dedicate themselves to other creators.
Content curation doesn't have to be as in-depth as what the big names like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video offer. It can be as simple as adding categories that divide your content into easily understandable sections so that people who consume your content have a better user experience than simply viewing all of your content in one long list.
Curating your content means to organize and structure it in a way that makes it easily accessible, understandable, and consumable. Similar to curating your favorite music playlist, you can curate your content into different categories, genres, styles, mediums, and themes to make your content easily findable under these lists and provide a fantastic user experience to your audience.
In short, content curation collects and assembles the most relevant content you have for your specific audience.
Content curation can also involve aggregating content from other creators to create a specially themed content hub. An example of this is Medium, a content aggregator for blog posts that allows creators to post and categorize their blog posts based on trending topics and what matters to the audience on Medium.
Another notable example is YouTube. Despite hosting millions of content creators who can curate their own content on their channel into playlists, YouTube themselves also curates their creators' content into multiple categories based on your watching habits and preferences. These categories change all the time based on the changes in your watching habits. You will find that your recommended genres, themes, and subjects will be vastly different from any other user of YouTube.
For our purposes, we will be looking at how to curate your original content to fit the needs of your target audience best , making your valuable content more accessible and easily consumable.
Imagine using Netflix without categories such as 'Comedies' or 'TV Shows. Imagine, was just one long list of videos that you had to scroll down endlessly in hopes that you may find that one show you were looking for or that one genre for you to browse through all evening. Sounds terrifying, right?
This is where content curation comes into play. By categorizing your content into easily definable sections, you create a similar user experience to Netflix or Disney+, where content is structured around their users and what interests them.
Many brands will curate their content, such as blog posts or videos, into convenient and reachable playlists and categories to increase brand awareness and have a more successful content marketing campaign. Doing so allows brands and marketers to highlight new content, relevant information, links, and reliable sources that bolster their brand image and trust in the market.
There are many ways to discover what interests your audience and it all beginswith analytics.
We've spoken about the importance of user analytics before and how SupaPass can help you better understand your audience in a way that allows for a greater audience connection.
Here are some top tips on how to find out what interests your audience and how this can help influence how you curate your content:
TIn considering how to curate your content, it is best to look at the big names and thought leaders in content curation who use the best tools to achieve a navigable and straightforward user experience and a stunning user interface.
Netflix is amarket leader in content curation. They know the right way to define a piece of content into a specific topic or hundreds of categories to make each film or TV show searchable by their topic, genre, actors, crew, and many other content features.We've all been there-you're scrolling Netflix, and suddenly you have a hankering for weird experimental films (No? Only me?). Well, you're in luck as there's a curated genre just for that. There are thousands of hidden genres on Netflix such as Binge-Worthy TV Dramas, Mood Boosters, and even Watch In One Night for those days where you refuse to move from the couch. These categories By creating content categories that are tailored to draw you in, Netflix you hooked and coming back for more.
Netflix also offers you popular categories such as What's Trending, New, and the all-important Continue Watching. These allow users to quickly continue watching the show that they're binging, or find that new movie that just came out, or check out the show that everyone is talking about as it all shows up usually in the first few rows of content.
Like Netflix, Spotify is genius when it comes to curating content and understanding the benefits of content curation. Spotify provides its users with an excellent interface to navigate through, and a platform that feels personalized just for them - both being integral to their content curation strategy.
The steadily nearing 200 million paid subscribers are greeted by 6 personalized music playlists just for them called Daily Mixes, filled with their favorite tracks and similar songs in genre, performer, and style. For those seeking something new, each week, users are greeted by a Discover Weekly playlist with completely new tracks they’ve never listened to before (at least on Spotify) based on your recent listening trends.
In a genius move, Spotify developed a content marketing strategy called 'Spotify Wrapped' built around your top artists, tracks, genres, and most played songs. These are easy to share across social media and give their users a way to show off their listening stats for the year: who their top artist was, what genre they listen to the most, and even share that they are in the coveted position of being in the top 1% of listeners of their favorite artist.
These short excerpts of data are used to create a viral and shareable trend which empowers users to do Spotify's marketing for them.
On top of all of this, Spotify has billions of user-created playlists to fit any mood you may be in, as well as carefully curated playlists made by Spotify, easily findable on the home page of their app or searchable using their powerful search engine.
Many modern Smart TVs curate your streaming services all into one place and allow for one single search to hunt across all of your on-demand subscription services and one-time-payment services for the content you wish to watch. This can save their users mountains of time.
Smart TVs curate the services and platforms more so than the actual content. They may recommend content within these services and platforms while on the home screen of your TV, typically the top trending content or your recently viewed videos.
Some Smart TVs also push advertisements that promote other content or content platforms you may be interested in watching or subscribing to. While this may be a profitable form of curation, it can lead to a negative user experience and cause distrust between the brands and their customers.
It can be a daunting task if you are a content creator with so much content spread out over different platforms, Chances are, you already have curated content before in your time online or offline.
You may have:
Relying on algorithms to curate your content for you is unreliable and hard to predict as they change all the time. One day you may be on the trending page of YouTube with a successful video, and the following month you may post a similar video on a similar topic, and the algorithm will refuse to pick up your content.
There are many ways to curate content online. However, some are far more effective than others:
YouTube offers each channel the ability to create playlists of videos that can be shared or are discoverable via the search bar or on your specific channel's page. Playlists can be a great feature to use for categorizing your content but can be frustrating to navigate as a user due to the auto-play function, which is usually accidentally clicked; being unable to have multiple collections within these playlists; and the inability to add cover images to draw people into each playlist.
Patreon allows its users to add their content into multiple collections using Tags, which allows its users to apply custom tags to each post on their Patreon page. This method is far more functional than YouTube's method as it allows each piece of content to reside within multiple categories.
The problem with Patreon is that the platform does not host your videos and does not have an audio player built into its website. Sending your audience away from Patreon to consume other content can be detrimental. It is not a good idea to send your audience to another platform: it's like you're a train station sending your audience away to other platforms instead of keeping them where you want them.
New content creation methods are constantly being developed. At SupaPass, we have been working hard for the past 10 years to give creators the content curation tools needed to provide their users with the best user experience available.
By building a stunning framework for native mobile apps for iOS and Android devices as well as a robust website, we empower creators to quickly and easily build impressive and breathtaking mobile apps and websites that have the 'look and feel' of Netflix, Spotify, and other top content streaming service platforms.
Additionally, we enable creators to effortlessly upload and curate their content into different categories and collections entirely customizable to your genres, topics, and content.
Similar to Patreon's tagging system, with SupaPass, you can upload your content to our custom content management system dashboard and add your content into multiple collections or categories of your choosing. That way, all of your content will not be restricted to one genre or topic and instead can fit into wherever it is relevant multiple times.
One of our clients, Brodie Sharpe of The Run Smarter Podcast, has masterfully curated his video courses on running injury prevention and tips on exercising into 4 distinct categories matching each of his video courses. Within these categories, he has created collections for the courses containing the relevant video content. His content creation allows his users to seamlessly browse and complete each course as and when they please without having to search through a catalogue of videos or use a sometimes-tricky search bar or hope that YouTube recommends the correct video next!
As well as this, thanks to SupaPass' subscription paywall services, Brodie has taken advantage of the ability to monetize each category of content through locking specific categories and collections behind a subscription paywall. Brodie safely and securely monetizes his content without worrying about making private or unlisted links on other platforms (which can often be shared without your knowledge!). He does all this while keeping 100% of the revenue as SupaPass takes 0% from your content!
Now it is easier than ever to host all of your video, audio, and written content all in your own stunning native mobile app and website. An online destination that gives your audience the world-class 'look and feel' of Netflix and Spotify without the cost of custom development and none of the hassle of learning to code yourself.
It's easy to get started, and we're here to guide you along the way.
Take control of your content curation with SupaPass today.
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