A practice used by a gazillion social pundits, content curation is the act of finding, aggregating, organizing and distributing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue to a specific audience. Content curation has created social icons out of, well, curators. Curators find success in the concept that “we don’t care what you think, we care what everyone else thinks.”

Maybe that’s the way it’s always been. Your favorite professor or teacher or newscaster for that matter does a great job presenting the ideas and events of the world, not in actually creating those ideas.

According to Hootsuite (saw that one coming, didn’t you), the ideal ratio will vary by industry and organization, a good rule of thumb is to share content that is 40% your own and 60% curated, making adjustments to this ratio as you discover what resonates best with your audience.

And if you believe that clicks are great but the end game is conversions (that’s what we think, BTW), then you’ll want to keep close eye on your ratio. Curate just third party content and your conversions will suffer, but not as much as if you just toot your own and don’t curate at all. The balance seems to be 50% – 75% third party and the rest your own content.

(Chart stolen in broad daylight from convinceandconvert.com.)

We used to call that, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

That’s like the argument, who gets the credit? The guy who did the great work? Or the guy who found and hired the guy who did the great work? And please excuse my gender bias; I chose to say ‘the guy’ rather than ‘the woman’. That decision is a whole different post, which of course, I’ll curate.