Nearly one-half of marketing executives (48%) now use content curation—the process of continually finding, organizing, and sharing relevant online content that caters to a specific audience—according to a survey from HiveFire.
Among such content curators, most (78.9%) cite thought leadership as their primary objective in content curation, followed by elevating brand visibility and buzz (76.1%) and lead generation (60.6%).
Below, other findings from HiveFire's first annual Content Curation Adoption Survey 2011, based on a poll of 150 marketing executives.
Content Marketing Challenges
But creating original content can be a time-consuming effort: 73.6% of marketing execs cite creating original content as their biggest challenge in content marketing, while 73.0% cite finding the time to develop such content.
Over two in five marketing exes (43.0%) cite finding high-quality content to share, while over one-third (36.5%) cite difficulties with measuring results.
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The Content Mix
Most content creators mix company-generated materials with third-party content: 57.5% of those who have used content curation in the previous six months say they use a combination of original and third-party content, whereas 18.3% use original content exclusively and 8.5% use only third-party content.
Social channels, however, are important to all content curators: 79% distribute curated content via social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Curators Use a Wide Variety of Sources
When identifying online content to share, most content curators turn to industry trade publications (78.3%), industry blogs (78.3%), and online news sites (78.3%).
Roughly one-half of content creators use corporate blogs (50.7%) and press releases (47.8%) as sources of content.
Content curation has taken center stage: 69% of marketing execs say content curation is more important today than it was a year ago, while the same percentage (69%) expect it to be more important a year from now.
About the data: Findings are from a survey of 150 US marketing executives from organizations across a variety of sectors, conducted by HiveFire in February 2011.
