Most of us know what content is about, but some of us don’t know what it entails entirely. Well, you don’t have to know much about it if it doesn’t concern you. However, if you are a business owner, learning about this is compulsory. In the business world, content is one of the core marketing strategies. In shortest explanation, content has a role in changing customer behaviour. Depending on content quality and how audience can understand the content, it will boost their purchase decision or even boost more leads. However, as a person who provides content marketing services, I get asked a lot about many things regarding content. One of them is the difference between content creation and content curation. Well, first of all, why are they asking me that? It’s because content is the key to encourage purchase decision. Whether the content is interesting or not, it depends on the quality of content creation or content curation. Sometimes it is not just about content. The closest example that often happens in real life is restaurant business. The simplest way to understand the difference between content creation and content curation is when you see 2 real life scenarios like these:

Scenario 1:

Hilda loves cooking and she wants to start a new restaurant business but she doesn’t know where to start. She has no idea what kind of food she wants to serve. After gathering some inspirations from her favourite chefs, she decides to create a new, original menu that no one else has cooked before. Whether people will like her new food creation, it depends on the quality of her food creation. This analogy, my friend, is called content creation. You make everything from scratch and start something new with your content.

Scenario 2:

Hilda loves cooking and she wants to start a new restaurant business but she doesn’t have much time to create new food creation. However, she wants to create trends from the existing and common menu. Therefore, she gathers information about interesting common menu that she can ‘curate’ from. After she gathers enough inspirations, she decides to create new flavour for the traditional food of which flavour is tailored to the current trends. The traditional food has been around for long time, but since the flavour is plain because it’s old. However, since Hilda ‘curates’ the food with trendy flavours. This analogy is called content curation, where you make something new out of the existing idea.

With those scenarios, it can be concluded that:

Content Creation is the process of creating your own content from scratch and marketing it to your followers or subscribers.

Content Curation is the process of gathering existing information like blogs, social media posts or, e-books relevant to a particular topic and sharing it with your brand’s followers.

Now that you understand the definitions, let’s find out about the benefits of content creation and content curation.

Why you should create content

• If you need these mentioned below, then you may need content creation:
• It generates leads
• It adds mystery to to the content, which boosts people’s curiosity
• It gives new vibes
• It is fresh and brand new
• Google loves original content especially if it is useful and SEO friendly
• Original or fresh content represents your business better because it is freshly made by you

Why you should curate content

• It builds online relationships because you work on relevant ideas
• As long as the content is not a copy of other people’s works and it is high quality, you can gain more leads too
• It is easier to work on
• You can get higher chance to do better than the original content

When it comes to content, both ways are still effective. However, everything also depends on how you work on that content. Both content creation and content curation will be effective if you have your customers in mind. Whatever it is you are using, always know that you should focus on your target audience. That way, your content will be more valuable and helpful.