Many argue that one is better than the other, with content creators criticizing content curators and vice-versa. While most of you believe that creators generate original content from the scratch which makes them superior than curators, there are some who are the advocates of curators. But the key to an effective content marketing strategy is to know how to blend these two marketing strategies together to effectively market your business and thereby increasing brand awareness and online presence. Let’s take a look at the differences between the two. 

What is Content Curation?

Curation began with art and museums, as a property of culture. Think about job of a museum curator who is responsible for cataloging and managing artistic and cultural collections. The curator or you can say the keeper of cultural heritage scours the research to find the best information and then presents it to the public in a logical way. Similarly, content curation is the process of finding, gathering and presenting the right information based around a specific topic of interest in a more structured way. And it’s the job of content curators to scour the Internet for all the necessary information around a specific subject, collect the most relevant data, and share the findings in a logical and presentable way. Content curation means finding the right information at the right time. However, content curation does not involve generating content, but instead, researching and collecting content from a variety of trusted sources, and presenting it in an organized and logical way that the audience will respond to.

What is Content Creation?

The idea is to have the content go viral across social networks. You want thousands – if not millions – of people to find the content that you so wonderfully crafted. So, you need to create content that will deliver results for your product or eventually your business. And it all comes down to valuable content. Content creation is the process of identifying the right topic of interest, deciding the content, and creating written or visual content that will appeal to your audience. It is the job of a content creator to finding the right components to deliver the right content considering in mind the different categories of posts, from educational to inspirational, informational, and entertaining. Content creation also includes selecting the right social media platforms and drafting compelling posts for each platform and giving people a call-to-action before ending the post in order to create strong engagement with your content.

Difference between Content Curation and Content Creation

Meaning

 – Content creation is the process of identifying topic ideas that will appeal to your online audience, generating compelling content – both written and visual – around those ideas, and making that content available to the audience via any media, especially digital media. 

Content curation, on the other hand, is the process of finding, gathering and presenting the right information based around a specific topic of interest in a more structured way. However, content curation does not involve generating the content, but instead, researching and collecting content from a variety of sources and presenting it in a way that the audience will respond to.

Job

 – It is the job of a content curator to scour the Internet for all the necessary information around a specific subject, gather the links from a variety of sources, add some context to the topic of interest, and share the findings in an easy-to-read, presentable way. 

A content curator is an individual who helps people make sense out of the content. On the other hand, the job of a content creator is to produce the right content considering in mind the different categories of posts, from educational to inspirational, informational, and entertaining, something that will cater to the interests of the audience.

Strategy 

– Content curation is an integral part of a content marketing strategy that leads to increased brand awareness and web traffic, improved customer engagement, higher search engine ranking, and increased readership or viewership. It involves finding the right content from a variety of sources including newspapers, newsfeeds, Email newsletters, social media influencers, blogs, and social media posts, selecting and organizing the content, and finally sharing it with the audience.

Content creation involves defining your goals, studying your target audience, focusing on your niche, amplifying your content, defining the content structure, refining the content to create a masterpiece, and finally, sharing it with the audience as blogs, infographics, or any other platform where you know that your audience is hanging out. Social media is the best platform to promote your content.

Content Curation vs. Content Creation: Comparison Chart

Summary of Content Curation vs. Content Creation

While both content creation and content creation are the essential ingredients of an effective content marketing strategy, the former involves creating your own content from the scratch whereas the latter is the process of gathering existing information from a variety of sources like blogs and social media posts and share it with the online audience. The individual responsible for content curation is called content curator whereas the person responsible for generating content and sharing it with digital media is called content creator. Content creation means generating original content while content curation is sharing existing content from external sources. Besides, both serve different purposes.

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