Content Curation: 5 Tools and 5 Tricks

You’ve probably heard of and started using content curation on a regular basis. Most people attribute content curation to sharing other people’s content on social media for a few Likes and traffic. What most of them don’t realize is that content curation, like most marketing moves, requires experience and insight to become successful.

Tools have become a must for content marketers, especially for curation. They help save a ton of time and money. They can also gather more information than individual searches and make sharing incredibly easy. Here are 5 such tools that everyone interested in content curation can check out:

1. Feedly

Feedly is an RSS reader that can gather feeds from various sites based on your preferences. You can add feeds from multiple sources like publications, blogs, YouTube channels or even your own company feed. This makes it easier to share news about your company, product, and competitors. To help you organize your feeds, you can create collections for different topics and revisit them whenever you want. Feedly can be integrated with a multitude of other apps that serve different purposes.

2. SmartBrief

SmartBrief gives you access to thousands of newsletters from across various industries like business, food, technology, advertising and much more. This means you will get the recent and most relevant information from the sources you trust and share them with your audience.

SmartbBrief delivers information through e-mail, web and mobile. Not only does SmartBrief provide information from various categories, it also supplements this with analysis, interviews, and best practices, provided by their experienced editors. Their app lets you track specific companies, people, and topics from across industries.

3. List.ly

List.ly is a unique tool in that it helps you discover good content by creating lists about any topic you find interesting. You can invite people to contribute to your list by adding their own posts and comments. They can also favorite lists, and share them. As a result, your list grows tremendously with the help of your community and audience. This allows users to get valuable information, share what they know and make important connections, all within a list. To make lists more easily available for the audience, your lists can be shared on your social media accounts.

4. Pocket

When you’re browsing the internet and find something interesting, Pocket lets you save it for later viewing. It is a content discovery tool through which you can save articles, images, videos and lots more. It even syncs across multiple devices, meaning if you save an article on one device, it will be synchronized across all your devices like computers, mobiles, and tablets. You can have access to your information on the go and share anytime you want. Pocket is also integrated with 1500+ apps and can perform a variety of different functions when combined with them. Pocket is available for many platforms like Android, iOS, Windows PC, and MacBook.

5. DrumUp

DrumUp is a great social media management and content curation tool. It provides you with fresh content on a daily basis. To make sharing effortless, it offers a one-click scheduling feature but it also allows you to customize the post or scheduling time, based on your needs. The schedule can be done for days or weeks ahead of time and not worry about missing a date. DrumUp also lets you re-post content in repeat cycles. The tool comes with a Chrome extension that makes sharing interesting content even easier.

As you probably know, tools aren’t all there is to content curation. All the ones listed above have their advantages but only if you know how and when to use them. You can’t just keep posting constantly and hope for the best – this is more likely leaving you frustrated rather than rewarded. You have to be smart about your sharing. Here are a few tips to help you out:

1. Be Organized

In order for content curation to be effective – you have to be organized. The first step in this process is to pick 2 or 3 themes and topics to work around. Narrowing it down to 2-3 fields lets you target your audience better. Once this is done, you have to find the best time to share information. You can’t expect your audience to be up at 3 AM to read your posts. To figure out when to post, you have to check where most of your target audience is located and then work according to their schedules. Have a set time, at least once weeks, for you to curate content, don’t do it randomly.

2. Use Multiple Platforms

Content curation is effective on multiple platforms – social media, blogs, YouTube etc. Use all of them to your advantage. Offer guest blogs on your own blog and also write for other websites. On social media, use more than just Twitter and Facebook. If you have pictures, use Pinterest, if you offer musical services, use SoundCloud. Everyone is on the basic sites, figure out where you will have the advantage and work accordingly.

3. Have a Voice

Don’t be a robot. Content curation like any other form of audience engagement requires a personal touch. Just like automated replies won’t get you responses, robotic sharing of content will not get you views. While sharing other’s content, you can offer insights and responses along with the links. Mention the original author or publication in your post, so they have a chance to look at it and maybe, even share.

4. Work as a Team

Working as a team with your fellow colleagues is a great boost for your business. Instead of sharing content individually, multiple people sharing it will make it more effective. Tools like List.ly, Brand Amper have interesting ways of doing this.

5. Analyze

You can’t get better if you don’t know where you currently stand. Analytics play a massive role in content marketing. Analyzing what is working for your audience and what isn’t, can help you fine-tune your strategy and curate accordingly.

This article is written by Jessica Davis. She has a keen interest in social media & content marketing and writes extensively about it. She represents Godot Media, a leading content marketing firm.