Top 14 Content Curation Tools
Michael Spencer
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
In content marketing, content curation is a vastly under-utilized tool. This is because of the nature of attention and inbound lead generation, as the density of content increases (digital marketing departments every year are investing more of their budget in content marketing), the need for quality content and a way to distribute it increases.
Content that is educational to your audience, does not have to come from your mouth. Just like you create some blog articles, some visual marketing and some video, curating content should be part of your content marketing diet.
In 2016, it's not realistic to imagine you can be a knowledge authority and a thought leader all by yourself, it's a knowledge base that is shared and that is what creates community. To have your target audience identify with you, don't think you have to do branding that is purely profit and self-centric, but become a sharer and a advocate of content that can be useful to them as people too.
The idea that content has to be promotional or even directly about your products is slow to die, content in fact should be an inbound lead generation device that speaks to your audience and promotional content won't do that 85% of the time.
On LinkedIn, there are 2 masters of Content Curation that I respect, Dror and Michelle. What I realized is, I enjoy following a good curator more than I do a good writer, because they can pick out quality and do the work of reading blogs for me! That's a marketing hack, if I ever saw one, where digital marketers have to be jill-of-all-trades, well that's a considerable understatement. Honorable mention goes to Julia.
Content curation is the future of content marketing in part, this is because it's easier and a better ROI to find quality content, than to create it yourself in some instances. Sure you still need to write and create content, but for certain purposes, it can be a significant part of your content marketing strategy depending to increase targeted social media interactions and followers.
Importance of Promoting your Content
Digital marketers find that for every hour they spend in writing a piece of content, they will have to spend 6 hours promoting it for it to yield the maximum ROI. Some marketers express this as a 20/80 ratio.
Top Content Curration Tools
1 ~ Medium, by far the best articles on digital marketing. These can be shared and ideas in them can help you create compelling content, give you writing tips, etc. The process is again as easy as searching the tags/keywords relevant to your industry and following influencers whose writing style/topics is in line with your preferences.
2 ~ Digital Marketing Blogs. Enough said, some of the best ones are linked here.
3 ~ Twitter, search your industry and keywords or by #, you will notice some influencers stand out above the rest for compelling content.
4 ~ Klout, has an interesting system for identifying the tags you share on social and finding the influencers in a domain. When I searched for content marketing influencers, here is the list Klout gave me:
This was literally quite useful. Here is where you see the vast superiority of Twitter compared with other social channels for content curation.
While not as mainstream, Twitter as a research, educational and analytics tool is unparalleled in social media. Not to mention all the tools, automation tools, post scheduling and tricks the Twitter landscape provides.
Liked About.Me if I find someone I like, I can follow them simultaneously on all of their channels via Klout. This is definatly then, influencer hacking at its most convenient:
Seeing the tags that the influencer is recognized for gives further depth and insight into the influencer.
5 ~ Quora, a veritable goldmine of smart and relevant user generated content, I'd go so far to call this channel expert generated content (EGC). Quora is my go to place for asking questions relevant to my digital marketing diet and learning.
Search by question and follow topics you want to listen to.
6 ~ Slideshare, another of my favorite tools for quickly learning about a topic. This is speed reading at its best, and often good for visual marketing snippets that can be recycled in any number of ways and snacks of innovation that can help you piece ideas together.
7 ~ Instagram. Repositing quotes and taking screen shots with your phone and recycling content in creative ways is great fun. Search by #hashtags on Instagram has even more interesting combinations and audience tagging than Twitter, since you can have 30 #s simultaneously to a post. The post can have text, images or micro video up to 15 seconds. Instagram and Pinterest are musts for visual marketing and if your industry has a strong visual or story-telling component.
- You'd be surprised for lead-gen on Instagram, how far motivational quotes (micro life-hacks) go. It's not just beautiful selfies and educational micro-videos that make the grade; it's content that's useful/inspiring to an audience.
To borrow from Julia's List, let's continue with more traditional tools, certainly some of which you might want to check out in more depth:
8 ~ Trap.It. - The trap evolves with what you curate.
9 ~ Feedly. - It doesn't pull images but may still be nice for idea gen.
10 ~ Scoopit. - Good for getting in touch with other content curators.
11 ~ iflow. - Create filters and ideas that align with your niche market. Brain hack for content ideas.
12 ~ Wordpress. If you have a wordpress go to read and search by your tag/keyword, you'd be surprised the quality posts that bloggers come with that relates to your industry.
13 ~ Learnist. -
14 ~ Babbly. - I'm having great fun beta testing this new content curating platform, I like the interface and the sharing concept.
There are obviously a lot more tools, but this will definitely get the content curator and social media manager within some food for thought.
Follow Michael@ on Twitter.
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Michael Spencer helps companies improve their content marketing, blogs, social media & video marketing initiatives. If you are a startup or smallbizz you may want to outsource some of your digital marketing needs.
Follow my digital marketing tips on Instagram.
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LeadGenerationAndSales.com. Content Marketing.
9 年Michael, in Wordpress, you can add a plugin called Zemanta and automatically find sources based on your keywords as you write the post. You can also add other's content to the bottom of your post with pics. If you become a member and participate, other's can do the same with your content. Personally, I don't curate content. But that's a personal preference. I also stayed away from article spinning back in the day and see it as related, but done in a better way i guess. I do share great writers with others and enjoy Jim Murray's approach to sharing other people's articles every friday. So, done that way, it's personal. He really reads those article and genuinely recommends them. I trust it as a result. But many just look at titles and use the tools to create the curated post. It isn't a personal recommendation. Some might go to the trouble to really read and only add content that has real value, but as you said, those tools were made to make it easy and less time-consuming. Anything you make that is 'easy' will always attract people to it and most looking for that easy route will simply pick some titles and hit publish. PHIL, everything in this comment should be considered IMO. :)
Social Media Marketer - Marine Industry Consultant - Writer/Editor - YachtbuildAdvisor.com - 88K+ total SM subscribers and followers - 1,600+ Published Articles
9 年Michael Spencer - excellent piece, chock full of good points. It does, however, cause me concern that you do not suggest or even refer to proper protocols for "curating" content without plagiarizing. It is well documented that to many, "sharing" means copy and paste without attribution or back link to the original publication. Cheers!
Mentor, Former Data Scientist /AI Researcher at HP now at Aquana Fish Farms
9 年Thanks for the list. I'm dying to check them all out.