Both consumers and marketers are faced with an ever more fractured media landscape in which informative and engaging content can be hard to find. But enterprising marketers are taking the reins and curating their own content in the hopes of providing the material that their customers are searching for.

Given the amplified interest that content curation has received in the media over the past year with the success of companies like Pinterest, content curation has become a mainstream tactic for the majority of marketers. A 2012 survey found that 95 percent of marketers had curated content in the past six months. Of those respondents that indicated they had not knowingly curated in the past six months, 100 percent of them had, by sharing an article, blog post or other content with a prospect or customer.

These days, almost all marketers are finding, filtering and sharing content, according to content curation services provider Curata. In a March 2012 poll of more than 400 US marketers and agencies that sold to business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies, Curata found that 95% had curated content in some way over the past six months by sharing a link, blog post or other content type with a potential customer.

The survey also found that 85% of respondents viewed the main objective of content creation as establishing thought leadership. Building a brand’s visibility and buzz was a close second, at 80%.

Time constraints are emerging as the biggest difficulty marketers face in content curation. Three-quarters of respondents did not have enough time to devote to the process, an understandable situation given that more than half of marketers said they were manually hunting for appropriate content on third-party sites. And an almost equal number of respondents, 73%, said their biggest challenge was creating original content to be shared.

Social media has emerged as the platform of choice for sharing content—76% of marketers said they used a social network as the main channel for content distribution. But it’s not enough to simply share content. Curation must be performed on a regular basis, and with quality content, in order to interest consumers and keep them engaged.

A survey by Curata (formerly HiveFire, Inc.) indicated that content curation continues to be an important part of their overall marketing strategies, and many are beginning to refine the tactic by implementing best practices such as sharing and curating content on a daily basis.

Curata recently found in its separately released Curation Habits Report of Curata customer activity that websites that are curated on a daily basis receive 18 percent more click-thru activity than those curated on a weekly basis. Curators understand the value of timely content, and today almost half (45 percent) of them indicated that they share content on a daily basis. This represents an 18 percent increase over the 2011 Content Curation Adoption Survey.

The survey found that more marketers cited finding high quality content as their greatest content marketing challenge compared to 2011 (30 percent increase), and three-quarters (75 percent) of marketers indicated that having the time to do it was the biggest challenge.

Other key findings include

• Establishing or improving thought leadership continues to be a primary objective of content curation: 8 percent more marketers cited it as their primary objective than a year ago.

• Social media is a preferred channel for both finding and sharing online content: 79 percent of marketers cited social media as their favored method for finding third-party content, and 76 percent responded that social media was their top choice for sharing content.

• Resources are being dedicated to content curation: 50 percent of marketers indicated that there were one or more people at their organization dedicated to curating shared content.

• Three quarters of marketers who identify themselves as content curators dedicate up to 25 percent of their marketing budgets to content curation.