Have you ever been in a situation where you browse the internet for hours hoping to get an inspiration and stumble upon interesting idea but can’t find anything aside from content you already covered? Producing new content is not easy. Everyone says you should post regularly, but ideas don’t come regularly. Scientists are still struggling to give a definition to creativity and can’t tell where it’s coming from. But one thing for certain – creativity can’t be forced. In such a situation, producing valuable new content on a consistent basis becomes an impossible feat.
There are two ways to approach new content: you can research keywords and see what people are interested in, or you can come up with thought-leadership pieces. Most popular keywords are usually covered pretty well, so it’s hard to be original here. With keywords, you’ll be basically be repeating what everyone else is saying. But when it comes to thought-leadership pieces the task is even harder, because you need to come up with ideas yourself. SEO content produced by others is a great source of inspiration because it allows you to assess what is popular with the audience, encounters many disparate ideas and then connects different pieces of knowledge and ideas to come up with your own brand new idea.
While you should always produce original content, existing content can give you some food for thought. Additionally, as an industry professional you must follow industry news and updates, and relay that information to your readers. Both existing content and industry news can be found online. But how do you not get lost in the barrage of the content produced these days? Content curation is the answer.
Why you should curate content
Content curation is the process of assembling, selecting and commenting on content that presents interest to your audience. Curated content can be shared as it is, or used as an inspiration to produce new content. Content curation is a wonderful tool that can satiate the overwhelming hunger of the audience for new knowledge and greatly reduce the time needed to produce new content. Here are some other benefits of content creation:
- It relieves the pressure. You can’t always be on top of your game, so when you’re lacking the inspiration curated content is a great way to stop feeling stressed. With curated content, you’ll be able to cater to your audience’s needs for fresh exciting content without feeling pressured.
- People see you as a well-rounded expert. When you always share your own content, you might get a reputation of a pushy salesman who can’t see farther than his nose. Sharing content produced by others shows the audience that you are willing to learn and appreciate others’ work.
- You create a network of supporters. Who knows what opportunities lie out there? Sharing content is a good way to introduce yourself and make new friends. Plus if you manage to establish good relationships, you can count on online experts sharing your content in return.
Before we give you a list of tools to use for social content curation, there is one thing you should know. Content curation is not a passive process. As you follow pages, groups, and feeds, you have to constantly analyze the information you’re receiving. Don’t just follow and share whatever you can find. Ask yourself: Is this relevant to my audience? Can I improve the content somehow? What new insights will my audience get as a result?
Top 7 tools for social media content curation:
1. Pocket
Pocket helps you save the content you like. When you’ve stumbled upon an article in the Facebook feed but afraid it might get lost in the Saved Facebook section, just click on the article and save it in Pocket.
Apart from saving articles, Pocket sends you email newsletters with new content you might like based on your reading history.
2. Curata
Curata is basically a content curation tool that finds content relevant to your audience. Once you fill out your profile and customize categories, Curata will do the work for you. On top of it all, Curata can help you repurpose content for your blog, social media pages, and email newsletters. The only downside of Curata is that it’s very very expensive.
3. Scoop.it
Scoop.it operates like Pinterest and finds relevant articles based on the categories you select. They also send you daily emails with an overview of the new content. Scoop.it is a wonderful tool that is easy to use, has free and paid versions, and allows you to share content from the app on your social media profiles.
4. Feed.ly
Feed.ly works somewhat different from other tools – it is an RSS feed, that accumulates content from your favorite resources. Feed.ly doesn’t recommend content, which is a disadvantage, so you have to have your own list of sources which you can then pull to Feed.ly. If you know your authoritative sources well, Feed.ly is a great tool for content curation.
5. Storify
On Storify, you can search and create stories from social media. The app then congregates all the content relevant to one event or story in one place. For example, you can pick the tweets that relate only to one specific event in Storify, which is usually hard to do on Twitter – a social media app that is overloaded with conflicting messages and stories.
6. TrapIt
TrapIt is a combined AI, search and manual search technology that delivers an outstanding content curation experience. With TrapIt you simply collect related pieces in one place, and then the app offers you more content based on the content already provided. In other words, you set up a theme, and TrapIt “traps” everything related to the chosen theme.
7. PublishThis
Similar to Curata, PublishThis’s unique selling proposition is its recommendation algorithm. You simply select the categories and then sit back and relax. PublishThis will deliver curated content based on the set categories in no time. PiblishThis has API access so you can also share content to your social media pages.
8. Business social media pages
Lastly, social media apps have their own tools for easy content curation. If you have a Facebook page, you need to like brands and pages to be able to see their content in your own feed. In Twitter, you can use Lists feature. Twitter lists are curated lists of Twitter users. Choose the users that frequently publish content on the same topic and organize them into lists.
Final Word
There is too much content produced these days. Of course, it’s not easy to sort through all the irrelevant information and find content that your audience will find entertaining and useful. But with the latest content curation tools, you can enjoy effortless content curation process, receive tailored recommendations, and enjoy an intuitive interface that makes content curation easy as one two three.
