In case you haven’t heard, content curation is the new black. Everyone is doing it to some extent — and many may not even realize they’re doing it.

Curation is fun, but it also offers some real benefits for marketers. It’s a good way of establishing thought leadership. A recent study also suggests that curation drives conversions.

Curation might seem easy, but doing it well is both a science and an art. In this post, I tackle the science part.

Finding quality content to curate and share requires good research skills. Here are some of the tools I use to look for unique, fresh content.

LinkedIn Today

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn Today. It’s an efficient way of keeping your pulse on what’s happening in your industry.

The key to using LinkedIn Today for content curation is to go beyond the popular ones. As you might expect, content from Mashable and Ragan — both awesome but overused sites — are widely shared, and these articles usually rank high on LinkedIn Today.

But the less popular ones are the articles that your connections probably haven’t seen yet. Keep an eye out for those and share the best ones.

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