Content curation is a beautiful thing in that it still allows you to establish yourself as an authority in your field, even if the original content wasn’t created by you in the first place.
In saying that, content curation does come with it other challenges. If you think about it, marketers are selecting content sourced from other sources to contextualise. And as the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) says, those marketers are also “redirecting traffic to external sites and distributing content across multiple channels – including email, social media, and feeds in addition to branded sites and blogs”.
So what then do content marketers need to be measuring? Taking into account CMI’s recent article Content Metrics: Assessing the Real Impact of Curation, the metrics you should be paying attention to are as follows:
Email newsletters
Curated content is very often distributed through email newsletters and therefore becomes a content metric that is worth measuring. Here are some of those metrics.
- Click-through rate: knowing the number of click-through rates puts you in a position to ascertain content relevance. This is because the assumption is that the higher the rate, the more often that readers are reading the articles referred to by the newsletter. This is not to say that low rates are a sign of disinterest. Instead, your reader could simply be looking at headlines rather than actually clicking through to view actual articles.
- Opt-outs and unsubscribes: these are the amount of people who are becoming disinterested by the curated content. If these numbers rise, you could try modifying the regularity of content distribution, you could segment your topic range to enhance relevancy of curated content or you can try and improve the type of content you are choosing.
- Subscriber growth: if your number of subscribers begins increasing, this could be indicative of interest in your curated content.
Website and Blogs
Curated content is frequently featured on websites and blogs. So much so that it very often becomes the instigator in return visits so a particular site or blog, driving audience growth. Here are some of the metrics worth measuring in this regard.
- Number of visits: this refers to the amount of times visitors return to a blog or curated site. Frequent visits would indicate that the particular source of content is favourable and that the reader regards it as worth visiting regularly.
- Time lapse between visits: if you manage to establish a consistent content curation schedule, you will inevitably gain access to vital data that includes how many visitors return and when as well as what they are visiting so as to identify trends.
- Visitor growth: Irrespective of whether page visits are driven through curated content or original content, overall activity is a very good metric to measure to give you some idea as to what size and type of an audience you are building over time.
Social media
The distribution of curated content through social media (SM) channels is massive, especially in terms of engagement and shares. And these are the metrics worth tracking in terms of distribution and promotion of curated content on the various SM platforms.
- Followers: a large number of followers on SM channels like Instagram, Twitter or Facebook generally results in an increased number of social shares which in turn often results in more views of curated content on a curated site or blog. It is therefore worth tracking fan growth to determine extent of content exposure.
- Retweets: another way to share content, one that can be played around with, especially in terms of retitling headlines of third–party articles. This gives you a way to communicate your viewpoint and also allows you to track each retweet according to its respective title more clearly.
These are by no means the “be all or end all” of measurable metrics but they are certainly those to take into consideration when evaluating your content curation strategy.