I don’t know about you, but it seems the more that I try to get ahead, the more there is to do. Trying to keep up with the latest technological advances for a small business, let alone my social media presence can be maddening. Thank goodness there is content curation to assist us.
Content curation is the practice of finding and gathering engaging information relevant to your industry and sharing it through your social media and other marketing channels. When done properly, content curation is a highly effective online marketing tool, one that relieves the pressure of having to always create engaging content yourself, and that, moreover, takes the hassle out of handpicking shareable content published on social media, blogs, or news feeds.
At the same time, content curation enables you to stay up to date with the most significant happenings on social sites and elsewhere on the Web, even on those days when you cannot spend as much time as you want on social networks. For many brands, content curation is becoming a necessity, as their social streams are becoming so large as to be hard to keep up with.
Don’t worry, I’ve got good news. Here is a list of 5 essential content curation tools that can make your life easier. They have been selected on criteria such as usefulness, features, and ease of use.
Pocket makes it easy for you to curate content naturally, while surfing the Web, by enabling you to save interesting articles, videos, or images in one place for reference. It has a built-in tagging system for easily organizing your saved content, as well as a quick search tool through which you can find a particular image or video you’ve saved. While not the only app of its kind, Pocket is well-built and convenient to use – it installs as an extension to your Web browser, adding to it a button through which you can effortlessly bookmark relevant content whenever you stumble upon it.
Furthermore, Pocket is available as an Android and iOS application, giving you great curation options even when you’re on the go, and syncing the content you’ve bookmarked across devices on your user account.
Feedly
Similar to the discontinued Google Reader but with more features, Feedly is essentially an RSS Feed. What makes it stand out as a content curation tool is its news aggregation features, which basically enable you to add your favourite sources to Feedly and then view aggregate news in one place, not just on your Web browser, but also on your mobile devices through Feedly apps. You can sort sources by category, so that even if you follow many different sources you can keep them neatly organized and easy to browse.
Whether you follow a handful of specialized sources, or a great deal of general sources, Feedly makes it easy for you to stay up to date with the latest news in your industry, saving you the trouble of having to manually check news websites. When used properly, Feedly is a very effective news curation tool.
Scoop.it
Visually similar to Pinterest, Scoop.it enables you to discover, curate, and publish great content in order to boost your online visibility. It features the core content curation tools you need to generate leads, improve search engine optimization, and propagate meaningful content and knowledge.
Scoop.it works a bit differently from other content curation tools. You start with a topic relevant to your industry and then it generates related articles and displays them based on their freshness and popularity. It also features complementary topics, which can help you discover curable content you have not thought about before.
Every day, Scoop.it sends you an update with fresh content, making it easy for you to curate content on the go. The free version of the service does have some limitations – one topic, two social media accounts max – but you can upgrade to a paid monthly plan to get more out of this powerful content curation tool.
The Bottom Line
There are many other content curation tools on the Internet, many of them free, including Instapaper, Storify, Readability, and Sniply, and you can also use Twitter lists, Evernote, and good old newsletters. However, using too many curation tools can be overwhelming. The three top tools presented above are easy to use and offer you all the essential functionality you need for effectively curating content for multiple social networks on a daily basis.So there you have it. Start curating.