An integral part of content marketing, content curation (the process of finding, organizing and sharing digital content around a particular topic) can be time consuming. A content curator picks the crème of the crop of content (articles, videos, images, etc.) to present scanning immense amounts of published content in order to do so.
According to Curata:
- 76% of marketers share curated content on social media.
- 79% of marketers use social media to find content for their curation strategy. (Tweet This Stat)
- 80% of marketers share 3rd-party content in order to improve company visibility and buzz. (Tweet This Stat)
Finding the right content is tough. Below is a partial list of the content aggregation tools we use daily to vet, select and curate content efficiently.
A very useful content aggregator, Alltop collects the latest headlines (with links) from the best sites and blogs on a specific topic and creates a web page. Use an Alltop subject that is already curated or create one of your own. Feeds are updated hourly so content is always fresh. Mousing over a headline will open a window revealing enough content to easily vet the article (great feature) without having to click on the article (think time saver). In their own words, “MyAlltop enables you to create a “personal, online magazine rack” of your favorite websites and blogs. You can create a personal collection from over 32,000 information sources.”
I refer to MyAlltop daily for social media news and content.
A hybrid of auto- content curation and publishing, Scoop.it! lets you curate content that you find interesting, add your own perspective and then publish it on your own Scoop.it! page, to your blog and share it other social channels you select. Scoop.it has both a basic free version as well as optional subscription levels. Free Scoop.it! provides basic analytics while the Pro version gives you deeper analytics for optimizing content.
Extremely customizable, and the cornerstone of Harp’s content curation process, HootSuite pulls in Twitter Lists, hashtags and/or keywords from Twitter. Content can be categorized or organized into streams which can be further organized into tabs. For example, we have a tab entitled, ‘Social Content’ which features streams including social media experts, Social media tools and specific social media related keywords. Although you don’t publish the content you pull in via HootSuite (which makes it different from Alltop and Scoop.it), you can easily click on any link and share that content with your social sites.
Tagboard is a social search and display tool–powered by the omni-present hashtag. Aggregating content from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Vine and more into a single hashtag-specific dashboard, Tagboard it is efficient at finding a collection of content around specific subjects. Tagboard also gives you the ability to Favorite, retweet, reply, comment, and like content. In their own words, “Tagboard isn’t just another social network; it’s a whole new way to experience existing social networks.”
Interest Lists are lists of people and/or Pages that you organize or curate under a certain name that you give it. They are a great way to organize and quickly scan relevant content. Create private, friends only or public lists. A great feature of Lists is the ability to follow other people’s lists. Once you find a post that is something you want to share, you can simply share it on Facebook or click the post link and share on your other social sites. Here is a Facebook list I curated entitled Social Media Buzz, and one that I follow, Facebook Experts & Resources curated by Mari Smith.
There are hundreds of conent curation sites and content aggregators available with more popping up daily. What is your go-to content curation tool?
