Social media and content distribution are often chief tactics included in a content marketing strategy; but, it’s not possible (or recommended) to share your own content 100 percent of the time. As a result, having a content curation and/or aggregation plan might be something to consider as a part of your long-term content marketing strategy.
There are many tools available to aid in finding industry-specific quality content that you can share with your audience to continually position your brand as an expert. Additionally, these content pieces can serve as inspiration for future content concepts. Below are nine tools and concepts to utilize for content curation:
Pinterest is best known as an image-sharing site, but it is so much more. Many companies use Pinterest to share their own content, but do not use it to its full potential for content curation.
There are a number of Pinterest boards pinned with excellent infographics, blog posts and articles specific to almost every industry. When you find these boards, not only can you repin these images to your own boards, but you can also follow the image through to the originating site, grab the link and share on your other networks.
Follow Hashtags & Keywords
Many of you are on Twitter, sharing your content and engaging with your brand’s followers. But, as you most likely only follow a portion of the people and brands in your industry, you may be missing out on quality content that is being shared.
To maximize your efforts, track keywords, hashtags and brand names so you constantly have a stream of content at your fingertips. Using a third-party application like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to set up saved searches for hashtags and keywords is an easy way to monitor industry blog posts, videos, infographics and more, so you can then share them with your audience.
Storify
Storytelling is an important part of content marketing, and Storify makes telling a story through social media fairly simple. Used by many journalists and news organizations, Storify allows you to easily curate online content centered on a specific event or niche in order to tell a story.
The tool allows you to aggregate text, documents, videos, images and social media posts to convey a narrative of a topic of your choosing. You can then share your story across all of your distribution channels.
LinkedIn Signal
As it is a professional social network, people use LinkedIn to share industry blog posts, news articles and more. When you log into LinkedIn, you can see all the content your network is sharing right on your home screen. However, what about the content shared by people in your industry whom you aren’t connected with?
LinkedIn Signal allows you to search content by keyword that is shared by your network, second connections, third connections and everyone. You can find Signal by navigating to the “News” tab from the main navigation, choosing “Signal” in the drop-down menu and entering a keyword.
List.ly
List-centric content is often popular on social networks, so using List.ly to create lists — about anything — is a no-brainer. You can make a list of the top influencers, tools, videos, infographics, etc., specific to any industry — users can then vote items up or down or add their own suggestions to your list.
Additionally, you (or anyone) can easily share lists through social networks and even embed lists to a website or blog post. List.ly is great for content curation, but it also adds a community aspect to the aggregation process, which is always a plus.
Subscribe To Newsletters & Blogs
Most websites and blogs have a way people can subscribe to have content delivered to them in some way. Some websites have a monthly newsletter that includes Web content, while blogs often offer readers a subscription to posts through email or via RSS feed.
Subscribe to newsletters offered by industry websites and to your favorite industry blogs, then share this content on your social channels. Chances are you will be getting newsletters and blog posts on varying days throughout the month, so you’ll be constantly supplied with fresh content.
Delicious
After going dark for a few years, Delicious is back up and running. What was once a simple bookmarking site is now a full-blown social sharing network, as you can now connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts and share on a variety of networks.
You can search for content through tags (keywords) and find links shared by your network and others. You can then save those links to your Delicious page — but you also have the option of sharing to Facebook, Twitter or Google+, making content aggregation and sharing a breeze.
If you don’t already have Google Alerts, set up for top industry keywords and do so now, as it is the easiest way to have content delivered right to your inbox. Google Alerts will notify you via email when new blog posts, news articles, videos, etc., are released; so by setting up alerts for industry keywords, you’ll get new links every day.
Additionally, you can utilize Google News to aggregate industry-specific content. You can do so by setting up a saved keyword search in Google News, which allows you to easily find local and national news coverage on specific topics. Google Alerts and Google News are excellent ways to ensure you’re keeping up to date on the latest industry information available.
Curata
Curating content can take lots of time — time that some businesses don’t have. Luckily, there are tools like Curata that make gathering relevant, high-quality content a more efficient process. Not only does the tool allow you to find, organize and share content very easily, it learns your content preferences so the most relevant content (to you, personally) is presented first.
Additionally, with a bookmarklet browser plugin, it’s easy to add content found on the Web to your Curata account, so it can then be worked into your publishing plan. With dedicated support for users, even those who are just getting started with content curation can utilize Curata.
Summary
Overall, it is recommended to have a content curation plan as part of your content marketing strategy, as it is imperative to share content other than your own on your social networks and even on your website. Consider following the rule of thirds:
Spend one third of your time posting your own blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, etc.
Spend one third of your time sharing the content from an external source
Spend one third of your time engaging in conversations and asking questions
The rule of thirds in social sharing ensures that you’re not just pushing content to your audience — and, that when you do share content, it comes from a variety of sources. When it comes to distributing content besides your own, consider using the above tools and concepts to discover quality content to share with your network.
What content curation tools do you use? Please let us know in the Comments below.
All images courtesy of Vertical Measures.
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