49% of B2B marketers identified content creation as one of the biggest challenges to their content marketing efforts. Thanks to the ever-evolving dynamics of the digital marketing world, a strong content curation strategy can help address this issue.
Content curation is essentially the practice of identifying meaningful content generated by third-parties and sharing it with your target audience. Until a few years ago, a 80:20 ratio between created and curated content was considered an ideal combination. However, a more recent research says a mix of 65/35 between created and curated content is a more effective formula.
To produce the ideal mix, though, you will need some smart content curation tools that will help you find relevant and shareable content frequently.
So, here’s a list of the 5 useful content curation tools that you should definitely try.
1. Curata
Curata is equipped with a powerful content curation software that lets you access an extensive range of published content online. You can easily search for relevant content using keywords, authors, and news sources.
Curata’s awesomeness lies in its ability to scour the web and recommend users content that would resonate the most with their audience. Curata makes these recommendations according to your past content-sharing activities and ratings.
You can customize and categorize content for review and then distribute them all from a single platform. The publishing and promotion allows you to re-purpose the curated content across your newsletters, social, blogs, and automated marketing platforms.
You can request them for a demo and get a price quote too.
2. Pocket
If you’re someone who likes to save content on the go, then Pocket is undoubtedly your best bet. Holding true to its moniker, it will let you “pocket” any content you like as you surf through different sites.
Pocket helps you create your own content library. So, instead of the umpteen list of bookmarks and innumerable emails with links that you would otherwise have to send yourself, you can keep all your favorite videos, articles, and images at one place for easy reference.
You can group those articles with tags. Also, it comes with advanced searching and tagging options that can help you organize content and make it easy for you to find what you are looking for. Moreover, its integration with more than 500 apps, including Evernote, makes for seamless integration.
You can always use Pocket’s free basic plan to get the hang of this tool. However, you can go for its paid plans that start at $3.95 per month, to more advanced features.
3. Scoop.it
Just like Pocket, this excellent content curation and distribution tool also takes after its name and lets you scoop all the relevant content online and curates it according to your needs.
Start by looking for a topic of your interest and Scoop.it will bring to you the most relevant and shareable articles and a list of complimentary topics and Scoop.it users that you might want to follow.
You can use Scoop.it to search, curate, and distribute content from the same platform, all this in only a few minutes. You can automate the content monitoring and search feature.
Also, you will receive daily updates on the topics that you follow, so that you can keep yourself informed on the most relevant articles to share.
You can use the free basic plan, which will let you monitor one topic for posting on two social media accounts. If you want to follow multiple topics and share them across all your social channels, you can go for a paid subscription, that starts at $14.99 per month.
4. Feedly
Feedly is another popular tool that fetches content from several sources, including RSS feeds, tweets, publications, blogs, and keyword alerts. It lets you add specific keywords and filters and curates a list of relevant and shareable content for you.
Content curation here happens via two ways. The first route is that of web browsing 1.0, which would require you to visit a site at a time, copy URL, and paste it. The news aggregation method, that is powered by Feedly, requires adding your favorite sources to Feedly. That will allow you to aggregate and browse these feeds at one place, both from your laptop and mobile device.
Also, Feedly works amazingly well when it comes to following your industry’s influencers, thereby helping you stay at the top of the hottest conversations and create content accordingly. Although it doesn’t fetch images, the lack of visuals doesn’t make it any less awesome.
And, guess what? You can use this mind blowing tool for free after signing up.
5. Quuu
Quuu is another free content curation tool on this list. It can be easily integrated with almost every important social media scheduling tool, including HubSpot.
Quuu keeps a tab on your social posts, platforms, and channels and based on that content, it recommends content that is to be either shared in your integrated scheduler’s dashboard or on your account on Quuu’s site.
You can put Quuu on the auto-pilot to automatically schedule social media posts with the recommended content. This makes the overall content curation process much more organized.
It comes with a free basic plan that you can use to get the hang of what it can do. If that works out for you, consider switching on to the paid plan starting at $8.33 every month.
So, Which of These Tools is Your Pick?
Before taking a call, try understanding the role that content curation will play in your overall marketing efforts. Also, take into account your team’s size. If yours is a one-man show, you might experience good results with the beginner and intermediate options. If you work at an agency, going for the more expensive options might be a good idea. Ultimately, it’s all about identifying what your brand needs and what kind of content your audience would love. If you have that figured out, everything else is going to be a piece of cake!