Content curation serves as one of the cornerstones of digital marketing. The term refers to finding material that is relevant to your niche or industry from many sources and sharing it. Of course, your content has to be relevant to your niche and industry. Sharing random content will confuse your customers and followers. For the best content creation, you need great content curation tools.
An example of content curation would be a blog post with marketing examples. To give accurate information, you would have to find sources with all the data that you need. You also need to find examples that you can share and all of this is part of content curation.
Tools that help with content curation do a lot of work for you, saving you time and effort. With these tools, you can have a stronger and more effective way of creating interesting and engaging content.
Why Do You Need Content Curation?
There are many reasons why curated content is necessary. Let’s briefly discuss some of the top motivations for curated content.
Extends Reach
With curated content, you can extend your brand reach by tapping into more audiences. You are incorporating information from other people into your content. This means you attract the people who follow that content. Of course, you need to give the content that you use proper attribution, showing your honesty and diversity.
Different Perspectives
Because you’re being diverse, your content will offer more than one perspective. This greatly enriches your content overall. It will also increase your credibility as people will find your content is not narrow-minded. In addition, your content isn’t all about you, saving your brand from coming across as self-centred. Let’s be honest, most companies and brands are guilty of this.
Better Quality Content
If you’re pulling in content from other sources, you are making what you have on offer more appealing. Variety is the spice of life, right? It’s the same with content. If you do it well, there will be no gaps in your content thanks to the high-quality addition of other people’s ‘spice’.
Not only is finding interesting content very time-consuming, but it is also very tedious. Fortunately, there are many tools to choose from. We will be taking a look at some of the best content curation tools in this list. We will start off with our favourite option and then move on to the rest, in no particular order.
Connections
When you use content curation tools correctly, you will share content from many people, building relationships with like-minded fellows. You’ll become a brand that others want to associate with. As a result, you’ll be connected to other experts and thought leaders.
Improves Your Authority
If you’re sharing high-quality content and enriching your niche or industry, you’ll certainly gain a good reputation. You will become someone with valuable insight that others can look up to and turn to for valid information.
Builds Your Brand
Curated content can improve your branding as long as it is done well. You will create a good impression and get a lot of brand support and loyalty. Of course, this takes time and effort but is worth it in the end. In short, no good social media marketing campaign can be complete without content creation and curation. Have a balance of the two and you’re on your way to marketing success.
Our Top Choice For Content Curation – SocialPlanner
SocialPlanner is an easy-to-use but effective tool. One of the core features on offer is the ability to discover and make use of trending and top-performing content. With this tool, you can find top-performing content from social media and the web. Then, you’ll be able to cherry-pick the best online content directly and use it as part of your social media marketing strategy.
SocialPlanner has powerful filters that you can use to narrow down your search to discover the most valuable content your audience would love to interact with.
You can then post whatever content you find directly to your social media accounts or export to your desktop to use with another tool. Also, it allows you to see what other brands and businesses are doing well and what’s driving results for them.
It is also really important to have a social media action plan that you can use to help impress potential clients. SocialPlanner can help with this. It can enhance your social media marketing and streamline your busy social media schedule on the fly. Easy to use and incredibly well-organized, this content curation tool’s drag and drop calendar is a must for all users looking to make the most out of their social media marketing. Overall, this is an affordable and powerful tool that will make your marketing easier.
Buzzsumo
This is a popular content curation tool that has been around for quite a while. Many marketers turn to it for their content needs. Often, the content that you can find on Buzzsumo is able to reach a wide audience.
You type in your selected keyword (or domain name) and search. In the results, you will find a list of the most shared content related to your keyword. Then, you can sort the list by using categories such as authors, date, type and more. All the content in the result is already popular with your audience, making everything a good choice. You simply have to find the articles that are most relevant to what you want to share.
Buzzsumo also has a ‘Content Research’ tab that allows users to find hot topics and interact with people who share your content. You can set up alerts to be in the loop when authors and influencers share new content.
Flockler
With Flockler, you can filter out all the spam content (and there can be a lot, depending on your niche). As a result, you will have relevant and fresh content to choose from. Flockler brings all the industry experts, your fans and followers to you.
In addition, this content curation tool publishes little snippers from your feed with the curated content. This way, you can analyse your content’s performance with the use of an additional tool – Google Analytics.
This is a desktop and mobile application that lets users create mini-magazines with links. These links go back to their favourite blog posts, websites or news stories. It is an attractive and popular content curation tool that is used often.
Once you have created the magazines, you can make them public and let others follow your content. Your content can also be shared on social media networks. This is a great way for you to find trending and best-performing content.
You can also create a bunch of magazines to show the world that you’ve got your finger on the pulse of your industry or niche. You can add your own original content to Flipboard as well, creating some extra exposure. Using Flipboard doesn’t cost a thing, making it a great choice for the marketing team on a strict budget. Simply download the app and create your account. From there you can create magazines and curate content.
SocialPilot
This is a more robust tool that is ideal for doing research for and conduction social media campaigns. But it has also proven to be a really impressive content curation tool. With SocialPilot, you get access to its features from the dashboard – easy and simple.
The content on offer is divided into relevant categories such as music, travel, tech and marketing etc. You simply click on the category that you wish to check out and get a list of content.
SocialPilot really makes it easy to search for and find good content with just a few clicks. With its social media analytics feature, you can analyse the post performances of possible content. You will learn more about your audience, improving your own content’s performance.
ShareIt
Yet another easy-to-use content creation tool comes in the form of ShareIt. It is free and gives you access to really great content. It is ideal for bloggers and social media marketers everywhere.
You start off by typing out your search, as you’d expect. You will be given relevant keywords, social handles and websites. From there, you choose one of the options and then you’ll be treated to a list of content. You can browse these, in different formats, to your heart’s content.
ShareIt offers an influencers section that gives you a list of popular influencers who are relevant to your search. This is a great way to find influencers with which to enhance your marketing strategies. Also, the tool lets you see all the content that was shared by influencers, giving you a look at what is trending.
Triberr
Triberr is described as a great tool for influencers, businesses and bloggers. It will help you find good content, curate it, promote it and analyse the results. Quite the punch that this content curation tool is packing.
With many ‘tribes’ identified by what they are interested in, you can join in on the fun of learning about trending and popular content. There are many tribes – cooking, fashion, finance etc. If someone is passionate about it, you’ll find a tribe for it.
You can make use of Triberr’s features to find out who shares and likes your content consistently. You can also set schedules for the posting of your content on social media.
Sniply
Although not as popular or well-known, Sniply is a conversion platform by way of content curation. This tool lets you add call-to-actions to everything that you share. This allows you to add buttons to pages that link to your sites. It is a good way to create more brand awareness in a creative manner. As a bonus, the tool can shorten links, making them easier to share on platforms such as Twitter.
Feedly
This is basically an RSS Feed but somewhat better. Content curation can happen in one of two ways with this tool. You can do web browsing and visit sites one at a time, copy its URL and paste it as needed. Or, you can use the news aggregation option. This is powered by Feedly. You add some of your favourite sources to the tool and browse feeds from them all in one place. It is a convenient and easy-to-use content curation tool that makes your job a bit easier.
What Defines A Successful Content Curator?
There are several things that make a content curator successful. We’ll briefly discuss these criteria so you can approach content curation from the right angle. Keep these in mind when you’re curating content.
Value
Your content should be something that adds to your brand. If you’re sharing random and viral content just to lure people, you’re not a good content curator. You need to have content that adds value. As a result, you’ll have better relationships with your audience and appear more trustworthy.
Personality
The content you curate needs to show it’s something your brand appreciates and reflects their opinions and views. Simply having uninspiring links to content isn’t good practice. You need to tell your readers why the content is worth spending time on.
Complement Your Brand’s Original Content
Because people get tired of hearing all about the same thing all the time, you have to give them variety. With curated content that complements your brand and what you’ve got on offer, you’ll give your audience a break. For instance, if you sell beautifully crafted desks, sharing content about how to decorate your desk is a great idea. Perhaps content related to keeping your desk clutter-free would please your audience while reminding them about the importance of a good desk.
Conclusion
Using content curation tools is a great idea and very important for effective social media marketing. Although having good original content is vital, you need to enrich it with supplements. These supplements come in the form of compelling, engaging and interesting curated content. Take what you’ve learned here and build a fantastic social media marketing campaign – with these tools it’s absolutely possible.