Medium Content Curation Guidelines For 2020

The Internet is really great and resourceful.

You can find any information you want and use that according to your wish — of course, by staying within the community standards though!

You can play with these resources in a constructive way, which we are going to discuss in this article.

The constructive way is Content Curation.

Many of us might have the assumption or conception that Content Curation means copy-and-paste.

But it actually doesn’t work that way.

A slight portion of the process involves copying, but it is not the content, rather the information or idea in the content.

As we are having original content creators, similarly there are original content curators.

Both activities involve knowledge, creativity, and research.

Many brands nowadays use Content Curation as one of the major strategies to be implemented for their promotions and content marketing.

Before we dive deep into the guidelines or methods of Content Curation, let me first explain to you its importance. It will help you understand its value and significance as well.

Why Content Curation?

Get exposed to varieties of perspectives

If you are in content marketing, you can feel that your audiences are getting bored with the same information or content pattern you share regularly.

You can often see a downfall in the user engagement for the posts or content you share. Here is where content curation plays an incredible role.

We all know that Earth is round, but very few know that actually, its shape is a Geoid.

As you surf through various websites, forums, or community channels of your interest, you can come across various rare information.

This helps you to plunge into a wider dimension and your search for this information is the very first step towards Content Curation.

It is slightly easy than creating a brand new content

Yes, the process is slightly easy — not that much easy which is claimed throughout as Curation also seeks a great deal of knowledge, research, and resources.

The process helps content specialists to identify the trend as what types of information or posts are liked by the audience throughout.

It helps with the idea by which a curator can ascertain the pitch, tone and catchiness of his or her piece of writing.

This is the second step of Content Curation, when after going through various sources of information, and then finding the correct perspective to pitch upon.

Shows that you are in the game

As you find the right perspective, it becomes easy for you to share your views and opinions and you can elaborately display your knowledge base.

You always get some more time to research than the creator of the content you referred to, which helps you create the same thing in a much better way.

Hence, you can always have the advantage of staying a lap ahead of being a subject matter expert.

This is the third step of Content Curation by which you can showcase your knowledge and expertise on a subject by identifying the perspective from another source.

But never forget to give credits to the original creator as it will help you in getting identified as one of the game players of the same field in near future.

Helps you grow your network and business

Now, as you have identified a perspective which is different from your regular pitch, you are knowing the choice of your audiences, you are in the game.

This will result in increased engagement of audiences with your content whose consequence will lead to growth in network and business.

If you got something worth saying, created, or curated, you’ve got people’s attention.

The more you share, the more eyeballs you attract.

Sharing and curating content can help you make connections with leaders and influencers in your industry.

This helps you in getting recognized especially on social media platforms.

Provides you with more information and updates

By now it is clear that for effective and worthy content curation, you need to invest time in searching for trending and updated information sources, this process adds to your knowledge base.

Spending time finding, sifting, and reading pieces across the web, for your industry, helps you learn more about your business.

Searching, curating and sharing content helps you to be on your business-toes with an ever-growing stack of knowledge and information.

As purpose gives rise to methods, so does curation raises your industry knowledge, especially on the latest and ongoing trends.

Get connected with influencers and build link

As a curator when you are sharing someone else’s thoughts, you are giving it more exposure and doing so in a favorable light.

The original content creators remember this. When it is done with proper attribution and purpose, it creates a symbiotic relationship with influencers.

Publishing useful and relevant content on a regular basis is still the fastest way to earn links back to your website.

Major Considerations for Content Curation

As till now, I was able to discuss the process of content curation briefly. But before you proceed with curation, there are few considerations which must be taken care of, so that your motive of curation achieves success.

Identify your audience

You must be aware of the fact that every book can never impress everyone.

So, you must understand and classify the category of the content you want to curate.

Based on that, identify your target audience. Be very specific on your niche and tone.

Identify the purpose of your content

Whenever you identify the content you want to curate, try to identify the purpose of the content as well.

By purpose, it is meant that what message can your content delivers, or, how can it be valuable for the readers.

Without any purpose or goal, your curated content is simply going to be scrolled away.

Judge the source of the content

It should not be that whichever content over the internet appealed to you, you start curating it.

You must verify the source to be genuine and authentic. You must be more careful when you are selecting content with statistics and data, as it must be perfect and updated.

Wrong or backdated data can ruin audience engagement leading to failure in your purpose of curation.

Check the uniqueness of the content

You can check this in two ways.

You can either check how unique and trending is the content you have selected to curate or, check how much uniqueness can your curation adds to the content.

To check in both these ways, you must keep the previously mentioned considerations in mind.

Forecast readers’ reaction

You must be able to comprehend beforehand that what is going to be the reaction of the readers after reading your curated content.

Make yourself assured that your content should not affect anyone’s emotions and beliefs on any realm or horizon.

The Famous Rule of Thirds

After you have selected the content and done with the consideration and checking part, now it comes the time to curate the content.

If we analyze in a generic tone, curation is all about finding niche-related content, extracting the idea, mixing it with your knowledge and experience, craft out uniqueness and share the output.

Now when you are mixing the selected content with your knowledge and branding perspective, few calculations should be taken care of.

The calculation refers to the Rule of the Thirds. As we all know that social media is the most effective platform to propagate your ideas and get identified.

So this rule is often referred to as the “Social Media Rule of Thirds”, but is applicable on all platforms. The “Rule of Thirds” is compulsory to follow while curating contents.

The rule majorly focuses on the ratio by which you can mix your ideas, branding perspectives and audience engagement motives with the content by making it unique and shareable.

The rule of thirds tells you exactly what to share and how often. It is a guideline, not a mathematical formula.

The intention is to balance your curated posts so that they are not all about you. Posts fall into three categories:

• One-third should be about your business, marketing and sales motives.
• Another third should include content curation, which means sharing ideas, case studies, and best practices of other leaders and businesses that will benefit your audience.
• Remaining one-third should engage your followers, build your personal brand, and humanize your business.

Now as we have covered the major part of the basics on Content Curation, let us go through how we can post curated content on platforms of repute like Medium.com.

In this section, I am going to discuss various guidelines and measures we should follow to get maximum engagement on curated content.

The Content Analysis

As we all know that platforms like Medium.com are very separate from social media platforms due to the involvement and engagement of industry experts and influencers, we have to be very choosy on the content.

We have to analyze all aspects of the feasibility and viability of the content before sharing it with readers.

We are referring to content analysis as RITU Analysis that will surely help you in this step.

RITU stands for Relevance, Informative, Timely, and Useful.

Any content or topic you wish to share must qualify in all these four parameters of analysis. Let us know how it works -

The Relevance of the Content

You have to be pretty sure that after curation, the content should not lose its relevance or value.

There is always a purpose behind the creation of any content.

That purpose should never get overshadowed due to your curation as if it happens, the curated content will surely lose value and you will lose viewer engagement.

Informative Content

The content must deliver information to readers in an interesting way.

It can deliver information related to the industry, ongoing trends or news by means of statistics or facts which you have already gathered from the content you selected from your research.

Timely Publishing and Sharing

Viewers always like to go through trending matters.

Ensure that you post the curated content as long as the heat of the matter or news is in the mind of the community of people. If it goes old, it is not worth investing your time.

The usefulness of the Content

Indices of usefulness in Medium articles correspond to the fact your articles convey to the readers.

Ensure that the facts provided are real, updated and collected from a trustworthy source.

Try to refer to statistical figures and business inferences from sources like Deloitte, Statista, Hubspot, Funderra or Webfx which provides updated and well-researched data.

Curation for Medium.com

Content Personalization

The curated content should have a personal touch of your brand.

This should never mean that you can blatantly promote links to your website blogs or service or product pages, but you must maintain the theme of your business.

Let us take an example, suppose you are doing mobile application development; your content must focus on the aspects related to that. You can never curate and post content related to mechanical engineering or general physics.

We all believe that any information becomes more enjoyable or interesting if it aligns with our tastes, goals, beliefs or interest.

Hence, to personalize your content over Medium.com, the following steps can help you -

Perform Reader Segmentation

As you are well aware of your industry and the best practices, you can easily summarise as to which category of readers you are going to share your curated content with.

This way you can perform segmentation of readers keeping your motive in mind.

Scan through the type of readers you want to read your story and identify the influencers as well, as their contents can provide you with some added knowledge and information which can go helpful in your curation task.

Track the right Publication

For a broader outreach, you must get affiliated with the leading publications over Medium.com.

Publications are the shared spaces where you can post your story amidst like-minded readers.

By selecting a publication relevant to your industry, you can reach out to readers who are coherent with your content in terms of knowledge and practices.

Follow Users and Publications

Now as you have tracked the readers and publications who either belong to your industry or keep interested in the same, you must start interacting with them.

The first step towards this interaction is to follow the readers, influencers and publication whom you have felt to be unified with your concept.

On Medium, you can tap into a thriving ecosystem of popular, passionate publications all in one place.

Thousands of publications are on Medium, ready for you to follow.

Explore and Follow Topics

As discussed earlier, it is very important that your curated content must be relevant, informative and interesting, for that, it is very essential that you explore and follow topics of your interest.

You will get ideas and information which can help you a lot in your content curation spree.

When you follow a topic you’re interested in, you’ll see a new section on your homepage about that topic when enough great new stories have been selected for it.

Considerations for Curation on Medium.com

Unique and fresh ideas with an eccentric perspective and agile thinking is what readers over medium demands from stories posted.

You must remember that before your stories get published, it passes through various stages of quality analysis done by the Medium editorial team.

Hence, you have to be very particular about a few aspects based on which your story is most likely to get evaluated.

The Editorial Standards

Your story must have a properly planned structure along with strong and compelling narration.

Contents with beautiful story-telling and easy to follow approach can certainly be at par with the editorial standards.

Value Addition Capability

If you are curating content, you are working on a content which has already been created by some author.

So, your curated content must have a value-addition aspect so that it can attract the attention of readers.

You can add value in terms of extra information, facts and addition of statistics to your content after referring to some reliable source.

Ensure Reader Categorization

As it has been discussed earlier that you must do reader segmentation, based on that, you must also ensure that whether the story written by you is suitable for your target audience or not.

You must be straightforward on the niche you are focusing upon keeping in mind the audience category.

You can never afford to simply flutter around a few anchor points and get your story published.

Check The Conclusion

Before you get ready to publish, ensure whether your story is complete, finished and a polished piece of work, capable enough to provide readers with satisfaction.

Check where your conclusion is heading towards.

Incomplete or unplanned plots of stories possess a great risk of getting disqualified by the editorial team as it fails to meet the writing and platform standards.

Citation Support

As your story is curated content, it is very likely that you have taken reference from multiple sources.

It is very necessary that you cite the sources of information that helped you to create a piece of writing.

All your claims and statistics must be supported with links to the original source so that story can hold up to scrutiny.

Good Reading Experience

If all the considerations and tactics discussed till now is followed properly, your story must give a good reading experience to the readers.

But apart from these points, a few other points which contribute to a good reading experience are truthful and honest facts, clear and relevant headlines with an easily readable story body.

Clean and Good Looking

Your article must be free from any and all types of typos and errors.

It has to be perfect in terms of uniqueness, globally accepted English tonality and gesture.

Perfection from a grammatical aspect is also very necessary.

By good looking, I meant to focus on the imagery you use for your article. It must be clear and relevant to the story you want to publish.

Reasons for Story disqualifications on Medium.com

Be it Medium.com or any other platform of repute, any story which does not abide by the qualities and attributes discussed above are very likely to be disqualified.

Hence to avoid disqualification and wasting all your efforts behind content curation, the following are few tips -

The Basic One

Your stories must be in compliance with the rules and distribution standards of Medium.com

Check here for the details on the updated Medium Policies.

Medium is an Ad-free platform

You can never violate this rule of Medium.com!

Your curated content should not hold embeds, images or promotions which are not acceptable on this platform.

You can never involve your content in being a cause for any sponsorship or promotional links.

You are only permitted to share information on the platform without any type of intent of backlinking or core content marketing.

There can be cases where you can promote your own work which can be your own book, website or blog link, but you can never do third-party promotions or sponsored activities.

You also cannot add images or videos to your content with inlined logos or embeds which can link your readers to some other website which is not your own.

What Medium.com dislikes the most!

By now you must have gone through the link shared about the Medium content policies, if not, let me do a briefing of the same in a different way -

• Your content must be neutral from all perspectives and should never ignite feelings of intolerance, prejudice or use of pseudo factual claims affecting the motivation or willpower of readers.
• Your content must never contain any type of negative tone to pitch violence, suffering, abuse, profanity or deaths.
• As you are curating existing contents, make sure that you have mentioned the proper source and gave credit to the original creator. Else you are most likely to be disqualified under the Plagiarism or Content Borrowing violations of Medium policies.
• Your story should never target any individual, group or organization with the motive to defame, shame, intimidate or harass them.
• Any type of indication towards self-destruction like consumption of inedible goods, self-harm intentions or suicide will never be tolerated.
• Contents promoting conspiracy theories, unproven or less qualified accusations with unethical intent will certainly disqualify.

Take Care of the Headlines

Headlines too matter a lot when you are posting your story over Medium. You must not do any of the following -

• Post your story without a headline.
• The headline of your sentence in All-caps.
• Headlines with typos and errors.
• Headline with links embedded.
• Headlines demonstrating profanity.
• Headlines with double meaning with clickbait intent.

Scan your Story before Posting

You must be very particular about the story type you are going to publish over Medium. The curated story you are thinking to publish over Medium should not be of the following types -

• Stories describing Medium wholly, as if you write anything irrelevant or just out of manipulation, your story will be surely rejected.
• Press releases, newsletters, sponsored content or content targeting solely towards marketing and sales pitch.
• Stories that are written in any language other than English.
• Stories based on erotica or physical relationships.
• Stories negatively escalating business reviews.

Story Elements that should be Avoided

Now while you are framing your story, you should be cautious about using the elements as well.

Keep in mind the following points which you should not include in your story -

• Call-To-Actions (CTAs) in a complex and elaborate way exceeding 40 words.
• Embeds that are collecting user information on Medium site.
• Intrusive or deceptive CTAs and/or promotions.
• Too many hyperlinks linking to contents or websites which are not of your ownership.
• Non-compliant CTAs or first-party direct promotion.
• Solicitation links or donation requests.
• Requests for claps or sharing the link of your story to other platforms.
• Include links to any other website, blog, or landing page belonging to some of your friends, acquaintances or sponsor.
• Request to Become a Medium member or participant of your publication if you have any.
• Share synopsis of any story and then link to another platform for a detailed read.
• Using images or videos as media with your story having copyrights in the name of some other entity.
• Stories with ad hominem approach with the intent of personal attack fallacy.

The Last Lines!

Medium is a perfect platform to post curated content as part of your stories, but never try to base your story completely on the curation grounds.

There can be chances of plagiarism or grammar errors, readability issues and unwanted solicitation intent leading to rejection of your story.

You must remember that Medium is basically ruled by 6 categories of readers. They are the critics or thinkers, the expressors, the connectors and the lurkers.

More or less, you will be able to find a sophisticated approach in most of the users which means that you are going to put your story on the table of subject matter specialists and experts.

This makes it very clear that you cannot afford to make a mistake or fault in your work.

You can also come across casuist interactions that can be irritating or appear like negative critics, but you have to hold up and respond to them as well to gain fame over the platform.

Be selective, identify your niche, write well, give credits to the original creator of contents you use — your curation is most likely to succeed well on any platform of repute with a glorified classification.