Content Curation Comes to Video: Introducing ShortForm

By Neal Schaffer

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of ShortForm. All opinions are 100% mine.

Content curation? Every time I consult with businesses on social media strategy, the theme of content curation always comes up.  I already wrote about why everyone’s content is king on Twitter, because for companies to be considered true resources of information, they need to be sharing content that isn’t always written by themselves.  This is why the role of a Content Czar in social media marketing is so important.  On a professional level, whenever we are sharing a link of resourceful content on Twitter, LinkedIn, or even Facebook, we are playing the role of content curator without knowing it.

On the other hand, we all know how video is a powerful medium and that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.  Videos can be a powerful component of a social media strategy to meet many different objectives, and I often recommend my clients to try to include a video in as many blog posts as possible to give readers one more reason to stick around and stay on their website.  If the company doesn’t have their own video, this is where they become curators of video content and end up displaying authoritative videos that best illustrate their point.

A company called ShortForm has now come out with a product that allows us to easily curate and display videos in our websites.

ShortForm allows you to curate videos from a number of sources and easily add them to create a “channel.”  You would expect to be able to add videos to your channel from YouTube videos, which you can do from the YouTube URL or even use their bookmarklet to aid in automatically adding all YouTube videos on a web page while you are browsing.  ShortForm also allows you to add videos that you, or even your friends, posted on Facebook.  I personally only post professional videos on YouTube, but for some who have a lot of Facebook video content, this can now be utilized to help create the “channel.”

Once your channel is created, you can easily drag and drop to arrange the ordering of the videos or remove any at any time.  In fact, the ability to manipulate your channel videos, add new ones, and check out other channels is all available on one long web page so you don’t have to wait for the ShortForm page to refresh.  Very clever!

What do you do once your channel is created?  ShortForm itself will display the channel on its own site for others to watch and curate from, but ShortForm has created widgets in 3 sizes (200, 400, and 740 pixels) which you can easily embed in your posts and pages (you can see mine at the bottom of this post)  or in your sidebar as a widget (mine is displayed near the bottom of my right-hand sidebar).

I believe the potential for content curation in video format is huge.  Think about it: You could create a separate video channel for each category of your blog, and when you don’t have a new or appropriate original video of your own to show, display your ShortForm channel for that category!

If you see value in video content curation, give ShortForm a try and let me know what you think by dropping a comment below.  In the meantime, enjoy my TV channel on social media strategy to see the potential of this vaulable tool