Content marketing is all about content. That’s obvious. What isn’t obvious to many local business owners is that they don’t need to be the ones to create every piece of content they share.
The term for using content created by someone else for marketing purposes is called “content curation.” The word ‘curation’ is a clue to what it involves. It’s not about throwing up any old piece of content on your Instagram or Facebook feed and hoping for the best.
Instead, it’s your job to sort through content online, choose the things that are most likely to appeal to your target audience, and then put your own spin on them – providing real value to your followers while building your authority.
It might sound complicated, but there are tools and resources that can help.
Pocket is an app and a great organizational tool for content marketing. If you’re like me, you might have a ton of favorites bookmarked on your browser with the idea that you’ll come back to them later. I’m willing to bet that many of them are now outdated – and you’ve never used them.
Pocket can change that. It keeps track of articles, images and videos you want to use in one convenient place. It also integrates with more than 500 other apps, so you can use it in a way that suits your needs.
Twitter Lists
Tweets come and go quickly and even if you check your Twitter feed throughout the day, it can be easy to miss worthwhile content. The solution? Twitter Lists.
Twitter Lists allows you to organize the people and companies you follow into categories. Then, you can easily access their Tweets and links using the app. It also integrates perfectly with Pocket!
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a paid tool that costs $67 per month, but it’s worth the price if you do a lot of content creation and need some help doing it. The tool scours the internet and grabs content related to the topics you choose, presenting it in one easy place for you to select what you want to post and put your spin on it.
What I like about Scoop.it is that it sorts articles and links by relevance. It will also suggest other Scoop.it users for you to follow, all of which makes the job of content curation very easy.
Sniply
Sniply is also a paid tool. It won’t help you find content to curate, but it will help you automatically add a call to action to any curated content you choose to share with your followers.
If you know anything at all about online marketing, you know that including a call to action is a must. It’s what tells your followers (and potential customers) what they need to do next. The right call to action will make a huge difference in your conversion rate and ROI – and that makes the low price of this tool one that’s worth paying.
Quuu
Quuu is another free tool that I recommend because it will pull suggested curated content based on the parameters you set. You can then browse through the recommendations and choose the content you want to share with your followers.
It gets better. In addition to finding and recommending content to you, Quuu also integrates with most social media scheduling tools. That means that after you find content using Quuu, you can also use this tool to schedule your Tweets and Facebook updates.
Facebook Pages Feed
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention something that’s built into Facebook and can be used, free, with any Facebook business page. To find it, simply:
- Click on “Pages Feed” on the menu on the right-hand side of your Facebook page
- Type in the name of a page, publication or business you want to follow
- Click the follow button
Going forward, posts from the pages you follow will appear when you click the Pages Feed. From there, it’s easy to share posts and add your own commentary and call to action. The one thing I don’t like about the Pages Feed is that you can’t schedule posts from it, you can only share them. However, if you open the link in a new tab and copy the URL, you can schedule it at your convenience.
Feedly
Feedly won’t find content for you, but it will help you aggregate the websites and accounts you follow in one convenient RSS feed that you can access from anywhere.
Once you’ve added a website or social media page to your Feedly account, you’ll be able to view the content on your feed from your computer or mobile device.
Curata
Curata is a high-powered content curation tool that takes finding content to a new level. It uses a combination of keywords, bookmarked sites, and other tools to scour the web, identifying the content that is most likely to appeal to your target audience.
Because Curata’s algorithms offer a service that goes above and beyond what some of the other tools on this list do, it costs more. Pricing is based upon your usage and you’ll need to contact the company for a free demo and a quote.
Publish This
Publish This is like Curata in that it uses a sophisticated algorithm to identify, aggregate, and suggest content for you to share.
In addition to curating content, Publish This can also be used to:
- Sharing original content that you create
- Sharing curated content that you find on Publish This or on your own
- Tracking analytics for the content you share, both original and curated
In other words, Publish This goes beyond the other tools here to allow you to share and track the content it finds.
Curating content can be time-consuming if you try to do it one link at a time. Fortunately, there are tools to make the job easier. The ones I’ve listed here are some of my favorites – and they can help you round out your social media presence, attract new followers, and grow your business.
