The Rule of Social Media, as varied as it may be depending on the source, always says you should never focus on tooting your own horn too much. Yes, you want to use it to share news about your company and new products or services, but ultimately, your social media channels are a platform to connect with your potential customers to provide value. This means curating relevant content from other sources, to engage, inform, and entertain your audience.
Luckily for you, you don’t have to spend hours every week scouring Google and the internet in general to find the content your audience is most likely to benefit from. There are many tools available to make the process of content curation easier for you.
Overview
Klout
What began as an influencer measurement tool, Klout has morphed into a content curation platform. After linking your social profiles and getting a klout score, it tells you what experts you are an expert in, and you can choose up to 30 topics that you’re interested in, whether you’re considered an expert or not. From within the platform, you can see various articles related to your topics of interest, and choose to add them to your social scheduling platform. The service is completely free. Beyond the content curation, there are also suggestions for the top experts to follow, so you can make the most of your networking.
Quuu
Quuu (pronounced “queue”) connects with your Buffer account. It is hand-curated content, available in a number of categories. After signing up for your account and connecting it to Buffer, simply choose the accounts you want to post the curated content to, and the number of posts to schedule. Then, you’ll be able to select the categories you want to follow. Options include things like: 3D Printing, Affiliate Marketing Strategy, Beer, Anxiety, Big Data, Business Management, Branding, and more.
The free plan allows for up to two posts per day, and up to five interest categories. You have the option to earn more posts per day through referrals. The paid plan is priced at $10/month and includes up to 10 posts per day, with unlimited interest categories.
Post Planner
Post Planner is a social scheduling and content curation tool, built specifically for Facebook and Twitter. What makes it different from the others on this list is that it’s not just about finding articles of interest to your audience. Paid plans also include a selection of engaging questions and memes you can use to break the monotony of posting articles and videos all the time, to add a bit of fun to your page. And, thanks to their algortithms, they can review the performance of your post posts, to predict the future engagement that’s specific to your audience. The algorithm will also setup the perfect posting times for your audience so you can add them to your plan, set the content for each time slot, and go. If you’d rather take charge of your social media strategy, PostPlanner allows for that, too. PostPlanner also works with Pinterest and RSS feeds, but it will be adding functionality for LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+ soon.
Plans range from $11/month to $59/month with annual discounts, to bring the price down to $9/month to $49/month. The basic plan allows for 10 profiles, 100 posts per day, and 1,000 posts planned. The top tier plan allows for 50 profiles, 500 posts per day, unlimited posts planned, and seven team members.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a content curation platform that allows you to discover content based on relevant keywords of your choice. You can curate the content, add your own perspective, and publish it to your own topic page, share it to your social channels, or embed it on your website. There’s a free account, which allows you to have one topic page, one keyword group for content suggestions, two connected social accounts, and 10 scoops per day. Paid plans start at $11/month when paid annually, and allow for five of 15 topic pages, with five or 15 keyword groups per topic page, and either five or unlimited scoops per day. Paid plans also include analytics and scheduling of posts. The business plan is the only portion that allows content to be embedded on your website or blog.
Feedly
Feedly is an RSS feed collection tool, which gives you a quick and easy to way to read posts from your favorite blogs, magazines, and even YouTube channels and podcasts. Once you sign up for your account, you can pick and choose publications to follow based on niche or keyword, and you can even create groups of content to separate personal interests from business ones. Then, as you read through the content, when you find something you believe will be of interest to your audience, you can add to your social schedule with Buffer or another tool.
The free plan allows for an unlimited number of feeds, along with the ability to organize those feeds into collections. It also includes Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest integration. The Pro plan, priced at $65/year, includes faster sync, power search, third party integrations, Dropbox backup, and premium support. The $145/year Team plan allows for more third party integrations, additional logins for team members, and more content curation tools.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a killer content curation tool, because it can also help you find influencers to reach out to in an effort to amplify your own content. You can find the most shared content in any topic area over the course of the last day, the last month, or the last year. You can set up content alerts for new content in any topic. You can filter content by type, so you can make sure you’re sharing a mixture of infographics, articles, videos, and more. You can choose to share content directly from within the BuzzSumo platform, or schedule it with Buffer. If you find there’s a certain author you love, you can set up alerts to notify you when the influencer or author publishers something new.
There’s a free plan that allows for five searches a day, without an account. Paid plans range from $99 to $699/month. The basic plan includes one to five users, five alerts, 10 trending feeds, and unrestricted searches. The mid-tier plan allows for 10 users, 30 alerts, and 50 trending feeds. The highest tier plan allows for 100 users, 100 alerts, and 100 trending feeds. Annual billing comes with a 20% discount.
ContentGems
ContentGems is a “content discovery engine.” It scans a variety of sources every day, to find hundreds of thousnads of articles for you to read and share with your audience. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in their massive database of sources, you can include your own custom collection of sources, which is great for microniches. It’s easy to find the kind of content you know will resonate with your audience with the filters, which include social signals, keywords, and more. Once you’ve plugged in your sources and filters, you’ll get a dynamic stream of timely and relevant content that you can use on your social media channels, your blog, email newsletters, and more.
The free plan allows for one interest with 10 keywords, basica filtering, and daily content suggestions. The business plan, priced at $99/month allows for up to 20 interests with 50 keywords per interest, with advanced filtering, and real-time content suggestions.You’ll get an RSS feed for each interest, and integration with hundreds of third-party applications like Buffer, Feedly, and Hootsuite. The Agency plan, priced at $199/month allows for up to 50 interests, with 50 keywords per interest, more sources and more custom RSS feeds. Discounts are available for annual billing, bringing the prices of the paid plans down to $74.91/month and $141.58/month respectively.
Curata
Curata is a content marketing platform with business-grade content curation software. The discovery engine learns what kind of content you’re most interested in, increasing its usefulness and targeting to your audience over time. The platform makes it easy to organize and contextualize your content with just a few clicks. The platform makes it easy to publish and promote your content across social media and any other platform. It integrates with a number of content management systems and marketing automation platforms, while also allowing you to define custom schedules, templates, and publishing rules. Pricing information is not publicly available, and interested users must schedule a demo to learn more.
Triberr
Triberr is a community of bloggers and influencers who come together to share their content. When you find the stories you want to share, the links to share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest. You can also visit these links and schedule them in Buffer, Hootsuite, or your favorite scheduling tool. You can also add your own content to the network for others to read, making it a good promotional tool as well. Just be sure that you’re sharing content for other people more than you’re using the platform to share your own.
Making Curated Content Work for You
The fact is, the majority of the content you post on your social media platforms, should be curated. The more varied your sources, the better, at least until you know what your audience is most likely to respond to. Don’t be afraid to vary types of content you’re sharing – from basic articles to infographics and videos. It’s important to realize that if you’re scheduling all of your social media content, that you need to at least take time to check in regularly every day. Your followers need to see that you’re live, and actually paying attention to what they have to say. If they notice you’re constantly running on autopilot, they’ll just stop paying attention to anything you share – curated or not.
Photo credit: StockSnap.io
