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January 26, 2020The Difference between Content Creation, Curation, Aggregation and Regurgitation
Content Marketing is an accepter of all persons. You don’t need to have gone to an institution or gained a certificate to participate. These days you don’t even need talent; as long as you have a phone, a camera or a computer, you are welcome to the world of content marketing.
However, there are aspects of content marketing that people get confused. We’ll be looking at five of these concepts today.
What is Content?
Content is any material that an individual or an organization puts together to engage, inform, educate or entertain a select audience. Content comes in a host of forms – from copy (text), design, websites, videos, GIFs, art, icons, movies and so on.
What is Content Creation?
Content Creation is the process of creating your own content from scratch, that is from the very beginning.*
- When you take a picture of something or someone, you have created content.
- When you write about a concept, an experience, or a fictional story from start to beginning, you have created content.
- When you record a video of an event, you have created content.
Please note that it is OK to take inspiration from other sources when creating content. As a matter of fact, inspiration is the bedrock of content creation.
Some of the content creators that exist in the Nigerian scene are Sisi Yemmie, Tiwa Savage, Burna Boy, Steve Chuks, ZfancyTV, Ayo the Creator, Zikokomag and a host of others.
What is Content Curation?
Content Curation is the process of gathering existing information, adding some commentary and sharing it with your audience or followers.**
The inclusion of commentary is important for content curation as it helps you own the content and rework the original subject matter to a language best suited for your own audience.
I will give a popular Nigerian example of content curation: Instablog9ja vs Tunde Ednut. Most Nigerians follow either or both of these accounts on Instagram. While Instablog9ja captures mostly gloom-ridden and crude content from everyday happenings, Tunde Ednut is the happy-go-lucky, crass platform that shares dramatic events and supports other Nigerians. Both accounts publish similar content from time to time but with different narratives using their captions.
On the one hand, Instablog9ja has adopted the exaggerated/dramatic Nigerian news headline approach.
On the other hand, Tunde Ednut shares laughable uncouth commentary like though he was speaking.
Two accounts, same content, different narratives.
An approach to content curation on blogs is to change the headline (by discussing the topic from another angle), add a preamble or introduction from your point of view, give context, before sharing the original content. Also, you should give credit here.
What is Content Aggregation?
Content Aggregation is the collection of existing information about a subject matter or keyword in one place for the purpose of gaining traffic or helping an audience with ease of access. It is more common online.
Knowing that there are a million and one publisher sites online and more keep coming up daily, some platforms have devised this as a means of collecting the best content without creating them and linking back to the original site. They know that their audience has no time to read news from 50 blogs so they take top content about a subject matter (e.g politics in Nigeria, Nollywood gist, etc) and publish the headline, half of the content or the whole post with a link back to or mention of where the original content is placed.
What these platforms gain from content aggregation is website traffic that could translate into advertising placement and ultimately, money. Quality of content or owning the narrative is not often a concern here.
A good example of this is AllAfrica.com that aggregates content about Africa and its countries.
Some apps like Feedly and Flipboard have optimized content aggregation by allowing their users to choose their own news sources and topics. Nigerian app, Bounce.ng is also worthy of mention in this regard.
Please note that the most important feature of content aggregation is giving credit to the original source. If not, you will be flagged as a content thief or plagiarist as described in the next concept.
What is Content Regurgitation or Plagiarism?
Content Regurgitation is outright stealing or plagiarism. In plain terms, it is a copy-and-paste, swallow-and-vomit approach to content marketing and it is WRONG.
Taking a piece of content – video, blog post, caption – and using it word for word and claiming it as yours is unprofessional and criminal. If integrity matters to you, you should stay far away from this concept.
Content Marketing and Management is a lot of work. I have had years of experience writing for my own blog, writing for brands, small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs and campaigns, and I can tell you it takes creativity and consistency to keep at it.
To build a business in today’s world, you must adopt one of these concepts. However, you have to consider your schedule and knowledge about your chosen topic. Also, content marketing across channels or sticking to one social channel is another thing you have to consider. At the end of the day, do what works for you, as long as it is not plagiarism.
Got questions or need clarification? Feel free to drop a comment or leave me a message.
Source
- Hubspot *
- AgoraPulse **
