With content becoming increasingly essential to a sound B2B strategy, Kavita Singh broke down the difference between content aggregation, curation and writing with our very own Propolis Hive ambassador for Brand and Content Strategy, Scott Stockwell. So, what is your company currently doing, and why should you care?

Creating meaningful content

is essential in B2B marketing as it can keep audiences and prospects engaged, but what further creates trust is when that content is purely yours. There is content writing, and then there is content curation and content aggregation, so let’s break down the differences:

• 
  Content aggregation
  
   is pulling data from multiple sources into a single piece of content without attributing where those resources came from.
• 
  Content curation
  
   is choosing data to pull from, crediting them, and adding some additional original commentary.
• And then there is 
  
  content writing,
  
   which is just that – it’s where you gather research through first-hand interviews and use your own additional thoughts to create rich content.

Scott says: “So it’s kind of like a fashion analogy, it’s like writing is a tailor or seamstress making the actual thing, aggregating is bringing outfits together, and curating is being a personal shopper or a stylist, where with the customer, you know the merchandise, you go and find things that go together for that customer.”

So if that’s the case, is content aggregation and content curation a bad thing? Not necessarily! Content curation can definitely be applicable for content pieces such as listicles, roundups and news stories based on press releases. However, when it is an issue is when it’s not attributed to the original author, which would be content aggregation.

Scott explains: “Is content aggregation a bad thing? It’s a bad thing if someone believes they’re getting curation, and it’s a bad thing if you think it’s the equivalent of writing. But as a thing by itself, it’s pretty useful. You’re basically just fishing for stuff that’s going to meet your needs. But there’s no quality assurance, there’s no quality check. You also don’t know if it’s really going to be relevant.”