For the past few years, those of us who are in the digital marketing field have heard the phrase, “content is king” pretty much relentlessly.
And probably for good reason – within your website great content can help you woo customers and search engines alike.
Outside of your website, in social media or email marketing, high quality content can help drive people to your website and also solidify you as a thought leader in your industry – an engaged, informed member of your industry community.
Enter Content Curation
This is where content curation becomes important. That is, sharing content that is of value to your audience that doesn’t come from you.
It could be a recent news article about a current event in your industry, an interesting blog post by an industry influencer, a compelling and relevant motivational quote…the list could go on and on.
Actually, the list literally does go on and on, because the Internet has given us access to a seemingly infinite amount of content.
So, the task of curating content becomes more about finding high quality, relevant content that your audience may find value in – and filtering out all of the noise.
Content curating can easily eat up 2-3 hours of your day. Not ideal when you’re super busy or when you have to spend time doing other things like…you know, running your business.
Since the start of the New Year, I’ve been on a noble quest, epic journey mission to find ways to save time on curating content, and I’ve found some really great tools so far that are too awesome to keep to myself.
Save yourself time this month in your content curating endeavors with these handy tools.
Feedly
This content aggregator allows you to select popular feeds from leading blogs, online news publications, etc. on a huge range of topics, from SEO to fashion.
With Feedly, you basically create your own collection of content publishers and organize them by topic. So the next time you’re looking for some outside thoughts on your industry, you can simply browse through industry leading blogs all in one place – without having to look through the massive results search engines will give you.
Since I started using Feedly, I’ve noticed that I’ve saved a good hour of time each week on finding valuable, useful content to share with flyte & Agents of Change fans.
I’d call it a “must-use” tool for anyone who needs to save time on content curation and really, for anyone who is involved with curating and creating online content.
Feedly is free for the basic service, it’s easy to use, and can be a major time saver when you’re on the hunt for high quality content to share with your customers.
If This, Then That
This tool has many great uses and shaving time off of your content curation process is definitely one of them.
If This, Then That works by following user “recipes” that trigger one action to cause another. For example, through IFTT, my Instagram photos automatically post to Twitter as native Twitter photos (meaning, the picture is displayed within the tweet, rather than my followers seeing a link to the pic only).
For content curation purposes, IFTT can help save you time by automating the curation process for you.
For example, you can have your Feedly content sent to a Google Spreadsheet or you can have your Feedly content automatically emailed to your Gmail inbox.
Social Media Examiner has a great article that outlines exactly how to use If This Then That to coordinate your Feedly content with Google Spreadsheets.
You can set up If This, Then That to send you an email with popular New York Times articles related to your industry (Technology, Entertainment, etc).
You can use IFTTT to have a famous quote from Brainy Quote emailed to you everyday (if you share meaningful quotes with your audience from time to time).
IFTTT can set up viral Buzzfeed articles to be sent to your email or Pocket account.
The possibilities are kind of endless here, with a vast selection of existing recipes and the ability we have as users to create our own recipes. Plus, this tool is free, so you can save time and money.
Buzzumo
This tool is pretty new on the scene and has already developed a strong fan base. Buzzumo allows you to search for the most shared content on any given topic.
What’s really cool about Buzzumo is that you can select to only see content within the last 24 hours, the past week, the past month, six months back, or past year.
You can also choose to view the most popular content shared by all or the most popular content shared only by top influencers. You can select the type of content you’re looking for i.e. articles, interviews, etc.
And you can view the number of social shares done within each major social platform, so you can get an idea of the type of content people are engaging with on each network (good for curating and creating your own content).
And that’s just the free version of this tool that I’ve tried out thus far. It’s definitely worth your time to look into this platform.
Conclusion
Content curation is becoming an increasingly important part of the digital marketing strategy mix.
Being able to provide your audience with leading news, developments, and ideas in your industry can help establish or reinforce your brand as an industry thought leader.
Content curation tools can make it easier and less time consuming to find the good content your audience will thank you for sharing.
What are your favorite content curation tools? Leave a comment and share!