15 Best Content Curation Examples That’ll Upgrade Your Marketing Strategy18 min read
Creating original content is vital to your digital marketing strategy but also time-consuming. If you’re relying solely on the works of your creation, then your social channels aren’t going to perform as well as they should. Enter content curation.
Adding this to your marketing strategy will ensure your social media platforms always look fresh and up-to-date for your users. And you don’t need to create any original content. Pretty simple. Just hit the retweet button, right?
Of course not! There’s an art to curation. It needs to be high-quality, valuable content.
But first…
What is content curation?
In a nutshell? The act of sharing material from other people or brands with your audience. These can be anything from infographics to podcasts and user-generated content.
Rather than using original content to promote your brand, you can utilize all the great articles, social media posts, and more that are already online.
Benefits of content curation
For you, the obvious benefit is the huge time saving it offers compared to creating original content.
It also builds trust with your audience, represents a great way to build relationships, and ensures your content calendar is always full.
Here’s a more in-depth guide explaining content curation.
For this blog, we will focus on some of the best content curation examples across the web from brands and influencers.
Learn from them, and take your marketing strategy to the next level.
- Bill Gates
- Oh Joy!
- IBM
- Moz
- Hootsuite
- Non-Obvious
- Porsche
- LADbible
- Guy Kawasaki
- Lyrical Ballad Bookstore
- Lush
- Starter Story
- Nikon USA
- ASOS
- MoonPie
Bill Gates
The Microsoft founder immediately lets you know that content curation plays a big part in his social media output. His Twitter bio reads: “Sharing things I’m learning through my foundation work and other interests.”
As you’d expect, a lot of his feed consists of articles and videos that he finds interesting and thinks will be valuable for his audience.
Much of his curated content includes articles about vaccines, world health, and climate change. But occasionally, as seen below, he offers a more personal glimpse into his pastimes and personal life.
Posts like these content curation examples help his audience connect with him and help make him more relatable. I don’t play bridge, but if I did, I’d find it cool that Bill Gates also enjoyed it.
With 60.6 million followers on Twitter, we think his strategy is working.
Oh Joy!
Oh Joy! is a lifestyle brand focused on design, fashion, and food. And its founder is the owner of the most followed account on Pinterest, with 15.2 million followers. Pinterest is a great social network for content curation, and Oh Joy! has it down to an art.
The company has created over 70 boards on its Pinterest account, covering everything from maternity clothes to recipes. Typography to baubles. The “Dressing the Bump” board has 3.5 million followers and is a mix of original posts and curated content from other Pinterest users.
The “Recipe” board leans more toward curated content, with the occasional original post.
Pinterest is unique among social media because users can create separate boards for different interests. Users don’t have to be following one another to follow their boards. So they’re a good way to reach people outside of your followers.
IBM
Even one of the biggest names in computing technology isn’t above content curation. This tells you all you need to know about its importance for social media marketing.
IBM regularly shares high-quality content on its LinkedIn page from around the web that they think its target audience will enjoy. These often take the form of news articles or opinion pieces.
It shows their users that they’re not just interested in pushing their product. But they also genuinely care about the community and want their users to be as informed as possible. It establishes them as a thought leader in their field.
Moz
SEO specialist Moz wants nothing more than to keep its users up-to-date with the latest search engine news and best practice. Sure, they create a huge amount of original material, but they also share the best content from around the web that’s valuable to their users.
Moz doesn’t just keep its content curation strategy focused on one channel. They incorporate it into their blog, email newsletter, and social media channels.
Their blog features articles from some of the best minds in SEO and marketing, establishing themselves as a thought leader in the space.
Moz uses its semi-monthly newsletter as an aggregator, curating the 10 best articles from around the web and sending them straight to your inbox.
On Twitter, they lean more towards their own material but still sprinkle relevant content curation examples from other brands and users in there when necessary.
Hootsuite
You know who Hootsuite is and what they do. They’re one of the biggest names in the social media space and have been since 2008. So it’s no surprise to learn they’ve got a good digital marketing strategy that utilizes curated content to support their own.
Hootsuite uses posts from other social media accounts to keep their followers up-to-date with the latest news across social. It allows them to be an effective authority in their space without creating too much original content.
Non-Obvious
Your content curation strategy doesn’t have to be restricted to social media. Email newsletters can be a great way to collect curated posts and get them seen by your audience.
Non-Obvious is a weekly roundup of stories curated by author and marketing guru Rohit Bhargava. Because it’s simply stories that interested Rohit that week, it can be rather eclectic.
The most recent Non-Obvious to hit my inbox features a study on why humans evolved to laugh and an upcoming documentary on human hate and Barney the Dinosaur.
Of the six stories curated in the above email, only one was an original piece of content created by Rohit. It was simply a few paragraphs answering readers’ queries about why he links to so many websites behind paywalls.
As a marketer himself, Rohit knows his audience is likely to have a wide range of interests. Sharing the stories he finds interesting in his weekly newsletter establishes him as a thought leader and keeps his audience engaged.
Of all the newsletters in my inbox every week, Non-Obvious is the only one I consistently open. Because this content curation example feels authentic and human.
Porsche
Content curation is easy on Twitter, just hit the retweet button. It’s not so easy on Instagram, but Porsche is just one example of a brand using user-generated content for its marketing strategy.
Yeah, Porsche sells cars. But their Instagram sells a lifestyle, which is sold through high-quality content from their customers. Look at their feed; you’ll struggle to find many posts promoting their latest models.
Instead, you’ll find endless posts of classic Porsches in stunning locations.
Porsche is a brand that people aspire to buy into. And its content curation strategy makes that goal achievable.
LADbible
LADbible is a huge media company from the UK aimed at a younger audience. They’ve achieved massive success sharing a mixture of original and curated content.
You’ll notice that they don’t use the content in its original form. Because in the above example they’re using a TikTok video, they can’t simply share it. But using the original file gives them a chance to add their own subtitles to the video, putting their own spin on it.
It’s just like a quote retweet, but with a bit more work!
And by adding the TikTok profile of the original poster in the comments, they’re ensuring their audience knows the path to take to get their own content featured.
If LADbible focused solely on its own content creation, not only would that create a huge workload, but it’d also miss out on endless amounts of valuable content that its audience loves.
Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is a marketing expert and Chief Evangelist at Canva. He loves sharing relevant posts from others as part of his content marketing strategy.
Much like the Non-Obvious newsletter, Guy retweets different types of content, from blogs to podcasts, that he thinks his users will find interesting and informative.
Many believe Guy to be the creator of evangelical marketing. So it will come as no surprise to learn that he also uses curated content to promote Canva rather than publishing his own.
When you opt to share user-generated content, you show your audience that you’re listening to the community and willing to learn about your product. When people realize you genuinely care about your brand and them, it lends authenticity, trust, and empathy to your voice.
And those are what we should all be striving for.
Lyrical Ballad Bookstore
You might not have heard of this small secondhand bookshop in Saratoga Springs, New York, but it exploded in popularity after a viral Twitter thread in September 2022.
Since then, they’ve ramped up the activity on Facebook and focused almost exclusively on content curation examples. They’ve taken their newfound popularity, and rather than use it to promote their shop, they’ve used it to promote other local businesses and bookshops.
Hang on, they’ve been promoting their competition? Yes. This gives them a really genuine and friendly persona. They’re promoting rival stores in nearby towns because they love books.
Their audience love books. Lyrical Ballad knows they’ll be just as excited about the other business as they are.
Of course, being such a small business, you can be sure there’s no concrete social media strategy. They’re themselves. They just happen to be nice people who want to promote any business in their space and small businesses they enjoy using themselves.
There’s an entire ocean between myself and Lyrical Ballad. But that little bookshop is now top of my list should I ever visit the US. And it’s all thanks to their selfless posts on social media.
Lush North America
The North American Twitter for cosmetics brand Lush offers a masterclass in curated social media content.
With 270,000 followers, they certainly don’t represent the largest page on this list. But because they share user-generated content, they appear genuine and really engage their followers on the platform.
Lush also gets influencers involved with their content curation. Sure, the YouTube video they shared in the tweet below is a paid ad. But they didn’t have to create the video themselves.
They’re a great way to promote your brand to a new audience, and it also means you don’t have to create as much original content.
Influencers can also be a great source of content you may not have thought of previously, which will diversify your posts and, hopefully, give you some new ideas too.
Starter Story
Starter Story is a website dedicated to sharing the stories behind successful businesses. From $3.44 a week, you get access to over 3,000 case studies with business owners sharing the stories behind their success.
It’s slightly different from the other brands and influencers on this list. Starter Story asks business owners who want to be featured to reach out to them. If they think their story is suitable, they’ll publish an interview with them.
They’re not specifically sharing content from others but asking others to bring the story to them.
Nikon USA
Camera manufacturer Nikon has just under 1 million followers on Instagram, and they’re a big advocate of content curation.
As one of the largest camera companies in the world, they have an abundance of great content curation examples at their fingertips from their customers and ambassadors.
In the above example, they chose to repurpose an Instagram reel created by one of their ambassadors. It’s a simple strategy, which required very little work from Nikon, and within a day, it received 10,000 likes.
Nikon also takes advantage of user-generated content for their social media posts. With so many followers, they’ve got a huge pool of high-quality photos from professional and hobby photographers worldwide.
Every month they publish their favorite users’ photos which have been published using #NikonCreators. This is a really simple and effective way for a camera company to show their users that they’re interested in the content they produce with their products. It also shows potential customers the results they could expect.
ASOS
Clothing retailer ASOS has tens of thousands of items for sale. How could you possibly create enough new content with such a large product range? You probably can’t, so ASOS doesn’t.
They instead make use of their large and active social media following.
ASOS knows its audience. They know they like to look good and post pictures in their latest ASOS haul.
But ASOS doesn’t just stick to curated content that features its own products. They know looking good and staying up-to-date with the latest fashion is important to their audience.
With that in mind, ASOS shares a lot of content from influencers around related topics, such as hair styling and makeup.
MoonPie
MoonPie is pretty unique on this list because, well, they have a pretty unique social media strategy. On Twitter, they’re best described as chaotic, which opens up a lot of possibilities when it comes to content curation examples.
With what appears to be an abundance of freedom, MoonPie can leverage current events for curated content. The posts MoonPie shares rarely have anything to do with their product, but they’re engaging.
We’re not saying you should consider adopting a marketing strategy like MoonPie. But we think they’re a really interesting case study for using a variety of sources to spark conversation.
In summary
The simplest form of curation is retweeting something you think your audience will like. But all the content curation examples we’ve listed above go one step further and add their own insight to the original post.
This significantly helps elevate their content above brands who press the retweet button and leave it at that.
Adding your own views and engaging with your community elevates your content to the next level. It shows your target audience that you’re not just interested in promoting your brand. It shows you care about educating your audience. They’ll trust you more and start thinking of you as a thought leader.
Now that you’re on the path to content curation enlightenment, here are some of the best content curation tools to make the task even easier.
Do you use curation as part of your social media marketing strategy? Are there any content curation examples you think would look great on this list? Let us know in the comments below!
