Curation, Creation, and UGC: Your Guide to Social Media Content Success

When it comes to what you share on social media, there are three main categories that content falls into: curated content, created or original content, and user-generated content. The most successful social media strategies include a healthy mix of all of the above, so we’re going to break them down for you here. 

Curated Content 

Curated content, in its simplest form, is content that does not belong to you. This content was not originally created by you or your brand, but it’s been borrowed from somebody else (as such, it requires you give proper credit). Curated content can come in many forms, but it is most often found as a link to a website that is not your own. 

Sharing curated content allows you to add your own voice, value, and opinion to something that has already been created. Sharing curated content allows you and you brand the opportunity to stay at the front of your followers mind and the top of their news feeds without using all of the time, energy, and resources, that creating your own articles and videos takes. Curating content also allows you to establish yourself as an expert in your field by sharing what you’re learning from and backing up your processes and opinions. Your followers will appreciate you sharing something relevant and valuable to them, and they’ll continue to look for similarly valuable things on your page. 

Created/Original Content

Anything that you or your business has written or created is your own original content. It’s important to create your own valuable original content to bring your ideal customers to your website. When you’re providing useful information, your reader will want to know more about you and your business. 

There are many different types of original content you can create, but your main goal should be to offer solutions to a problem that your ideal customer has. For example, as a marketing agency, we give advice and seek to answer questions on the things we know best: social media, digital marketing, traditional marketing, online advertising, etc. Our ideal clients would be small businesses in need of assistance on their digital marketing strategy. The content that we create provides value (we hope) and teaches you some basic strategies for marketing your business. Maybe a reader will see a handful of our posts and realize that they need to invest in some help to up their marketing game, which will lead them to reach out to us. That’s the power of original content! 

User-Generated Content (UGC)

The third type of social media content is user-generated content. Any type of content that comes from your customers is considered to be user-generated content. We often see this in the form of photos or videos with products, books, or mentioning your services. For example, the hashtag #starbucks on Instagram has over 35.6 million photos at the time of this writing. The photos and videos you see when you scroll through the list show happy customers holding their coffee cups and other artfully designed shots featuring those white cups. If Starbucks was to share any of these photos, which they occasionally do, they would be sharing UGC. 

UGC can be a goldmine for your business since it shows potential customers that other people just like themselves are using and enjoying what you have to offer. If you would like to begin incorporating UGC into your social media strategy, your first step is to get users to actually generate content for you. Hosting a photo or video-based giveaway or contest is a great way to do this.