Infographic: The Perfect Balance Between Content Creation and Content Curation

Content creation vs content curation- the age old debate. Which is the more effective content marketing strategy, creating your own content from scratch, or curating the best content from around the web? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is both. Creating a content marketing strategy can be difficult, and self-promotion is a delicate act. Social media is all about conversations and genuine relationships. Promoting your own brand’s content could make you appear self-absorbed, yet if you don’t promote yourself, then who will? If you always only push your brand’s original content, your followers may drop away like flies. If you only curate content and drive traffic to other people’s content, then where is your return on investment for resources spent on social?

Finding the balance between curation and creation is a difficult challenge, but in order to harness the business potential of social, figuring out the right ratio is a necessity. Not to worry, it’s possible to both create and curate content effectively.

Here are some statistics about content curation vs content creation to consider when developing and balancing your content curation strategy:

• Posting links to 3rd party sites generates 33% more clicks than posts linked to owned sites
• Posting links to owned websites generates a 54% higher click-to-conversion rate than posts that link to 3rd party websites
• Curators who link to 3rd party sites 75% or more of the time on average get 47.8% more clicks per post, 0.2% more click-to-conversion rate, and 0.10 conversions per post
• Self-promoters who link to their own content 50% or more of the time on average get 17 clicks per post, 2.4% click-to-conversion rate, and 0.41 conversions per post on average

The goal with any content marketing strategy is to find a balance between both content curation and creation. By linking to 3rd party sites 50-75% of the time, you’ll see an average of 38.4 clicks per post, 2.5% click-to-conversion rate, and 0.95 conversions per post. That’s an improvement over purely self-promotional posting.

Not only does a combination of content creation and curation have many benefits such as building strong relationships with the right people, it makes your content a lot more useful, and generates a much higher click-rate. You wouldn’t trust experts who only cited themselves, would you? That’s where it comes in handy to both create and curate content.

Curated content vs created has the benefit of not requiring time to write it. That’s not to say it’s less valuable, however. By curating different kinds of content, you increase engagement rates even more. Try linking to videos, podcasts, and infographics. Content curation best practices vary from brand to brand, but in general you want to make sure you’re sharing the most useful and relevant content possible.

Retargeting is another piece of the puzzle that can help make the most of your content marketing campaigns. There are several different kinds of retargeting campaigns that exist to help creative curation strategies, leading to increased clicks and conversations.

Finding the sweet spot between content curation and content creation is an important step towards creating the perfect social marketing strategy. Once you figure out the ratio that works for your brand how do you make the most of it? Your original content may get more conversion, but Sniply’s link shortener is one of the top content curation tools available, and can help you make the most of your curated content with custom CTAs, advanced analytics and more. Who says you can’t have the benefits of both worlds?