Successful content curation requires two things. The first is understanding your audience and what they want to see. The second is finding and sharing relevant content. Ideally this content will come from multiple sources and will include text based content, images, videos, and interactive content.
Curated content should also focus on information and entertainment and not promotion. Ideally, curating content supplements the personalized content you provide to your audience. However, if you are new to content marketing or have limited resources to create your own content, curation is a great option.
You may curate content on your website and your social media pages. The biggest challenges of curating content is finding content, organizing it, determining the best places to release the content, timing the release of the content, and then managing the interaction that results. Fortunately, there are several tools and utilities that you can use to get this job done. In fact, here are 10 that you can use to leverage shared content to your advantage.
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Scoop It
If you know the topic that you want to curate, all you need to do is enter it into the Scoop It website.
You will very quickly be connected to multiple sources of content that matches your needs, and you will also be connected to others who are curating content so that you can participate in a community that shares and creates content to be shared.
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Pocket
You never know when or where you might find content. There’s the great video you see while you’re scrolling through Facebook on the train, the hilarious gif you see on Tumblr, or maybe a great article that you think your audience would love to read that somebody forwards to you.
The challenge is, once you find content, what do you do with it? You don’t always have the chance to review the content, add your own commentary, and share it the moment you run across it.
This is where Pocket comes in handy. Just take the content you find, move it into the pocket app, and then access and consume at your convenience. -
Quora
Once you set up your account on Quora (you can sign in via Facebook for ease and convenience), you can search for content using keywords, receive content suggestions through your email, and see the content that your contacts are sharing. Your Quora ‘feed’ contains top stories and items of local interest.
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Smart Custom Writing
Smart Custom Writing is a great resource on many levels. The website itself contains blog content that is perfect for a variety of audiences, and is ripe for curation. It is also a resource for business content, and even offers rewriting services if you are interested in repurposing some of your old content.
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Pinterest
Pinterest is more than just a repository for recipe, design, and craft ideas. Although, those things can make great content, depending on your audience. If you follow industry leaders, well – known social media icons (especially those popular with your audience), and other people of interest, you can pin lots of content ideas that you can put to use later on. Be sure to install the ‘Pin It’ plugin so that you can pin content you find on the internet for later examination.
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Storify
You can use anything from news items on your social media feeds, images you find on the internet, and your own content to create stories that blend both text and images. When sign up with Storify, you can share your own stories for others to use, browse stories that you might like to curate, or both.
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Triberr
You probably already know that the best content sources are individuals and businesses who are in your niche. Triberr allows you to log in and find your tribe(s).
These are groups divided by areas of interest. Search out the tribes that you want to become a part of, join them, and then take part in conversations, and curate and share content to your hearts desire. This is a great tool if you want to find great, relevant, and shareable content. It’s also a great place to increase your industry related knowledge.
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My Curator
If you are using WordPress, My Curator is a plugin that you must add to your arsenal. My Curator will search out content that is useful to you and then offer that content to you for your use. My curator is highly customizable, as you can select the news feeds that you want to utilize.
It also does a very good job of filtering out spam and irrelevant content. Considering that every suggested post it sends you contains an attribution link, image, and an excerpt, this is as close to hands off curation as you can get.
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Trap It
Trap It allows you to create traps for content. You can create a trap using keywords, or by using a URL. Trap It then continually seeks out relevant content and puts that content into your traps. Then, you can use that content whenever you decide to access it.
You can also train Trap It to understand your preferences more and more each time you use it. Simply give the content you receive a thumbs up or thumbs down based on how useful you find it. Trap It provides summaries and headlines with its content offerings, but these can be modified if you would prefer to use your own text.
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Post Planner
It doesn’t matter if you find the best content on the planet, if you aren’t sharing it intelligently and consistently, you’re wasting your time. This is why Post Planner is worth the low monthly subscription fee that you will pay to have your social media posts sent out to your audience on a 24 hour cycle.
In addition to this, you can use Post Planner to re-post the content that has received the most attention, and to receive post suggestions based on your niche and your audience.
Julie Ellis
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- 10 Curation Tools and Utilities to Boost Your Content Marketing - October 4, 2015