So much content written on the web everyday, that sometimes finding great content to read becomes a challenge. With the onset of different social media tools, discovering awesome content to share with your community is a thrill in itself. Content Curation is unlike Content Marketing where it focuses on amalgamating content from different sources on a particular subject (in this case your favorite topic) and delivering it in an organized fashion. Being a content curator is a great responsibility, studying new points of view on different subjects and sharing it with your community which can provide value to them.
People love to read great content. How can you provide it to them?
Here’s how to get started:
Feedly has become my go to reader after the unfortunate demise of Google Reader. You can organize the blogs you read in to different folders (topics). You can also search for the topic of interest with a hashtag search facility inside Feedly which is the most exciting part of this service enabling you to subscribe the top blogs of the particular topic. When you read content from a particular blog on a regular basis, you can promote the blog to ‘Must Reads’ section of Feedly where they can be read and delivered to you on a priority basis so you do not miss any of it every time you log in to the service.
Here’s what my Must Read Blogs list look like on Feedly currently:
News.me helps you re-surface what you might have missed on your social channels. It delivers the most read and shared content from your community in your inbox as a daily digest. You can sit back and relax to read what was most talked about content on your social channels based on popularity.
Medium has been a great new addition to the blogging category with one of the most deep and shareable articles to go by each week. You can follow collections based on your topic (like i follow this one on Social Media) to read through what users think and pen down. Medium also gives you an email digest on the stories recommended and written by people you follow on the website. A great way to follow popular authors and not miss a post from them.
Some of them you can follow on Medium are:
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FlipBoard:
Lately I have re-ignited my interest in Flipboard. After being ignoring the app on my Nexus, I decided to give it a try once again and the app has made a lot of changes in their UI as well as services. Flipboard Magazines are the visual way of organizing your content in to different topics, something which i have started doing with various topics of my interest. Users can follow other’s magazines and share or read stories directly via the application. The visual interface and reading experience of Flipboard still triumphs over Feedly, however the latter works more on a simplicity level.
If you are interested in Digital Marketing, You can subscribe to any of these below magazines on FlipBoard or start your own Curation Magazine with them. All you need is a smartphone or a bookmarklet (Get it here) to get started
Search Engine Optimization 101
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Slideshare
Slideshare can be a great source of inspiration with some great visual communications being added to the LinkedIn acquired website daily. The website being tightly integrated with LinkedIn also makes it a hot property of communication among professionals from all the industries.
Here are some of the popular slideshares from 2014 which you can glance through:
The Making of a Digital Strategy
10 Profound Quotes from Robin Williams
Follow regular content generators. Enjoy.
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Pocket Hits
Pocket is a read it later service which you can use extensively with different services. I use the service as a read it later as well as a bookmarking tool for referencing articles on different topics. Tags in Pocket help you segregate content in various topics.
For example, I tag contents which i find interesting on the go and to be read later as #ToBeRead in Pocket while after reading them if i find them worth referencing for later blog posts, i re-tag them as #References
You can also follow @PocketHits on Twitter for the most popular (and saved) stories of the day from Pocket App
You can also use IFTTT to save the most dugg story on Digg and save directly to Pocket to be caught up later on.
Swayy is a user personalization and content discovery tool which focuses on your community and gives you the most relevant content based on the topics you choose. Similar to News.Me but different in some aspects, Swayy provides you with a dashboard of content to choose from giving you the ability to share content directly from the dashboard on your social timeline along with tracking capabilities. This is a great tool worth trying
Only if they had a Mobile app to make it more convenient
You can also try Klout which also works on the same mechanism
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Twitter Lists
Twitter Lists are still an underutilized feature which many users can use to their full potential. Twitter Lists are a great way to cut out noise from your home feed and focus on one particular topic. You can add Twitter accounts (or blogs) which provide you with new content everyday according to your liking and share from them accordingly based on the value to your community. For starters you can subscribe to these Twitter lists on Social Media and our favorite blogs
Blogs that Digital Insights read
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Moz Top 10
This is a fortnightly email digest from the guys at Moz strictly concentrated around SEO and Digital domain. So if you are looking for a great content to read from this domain, I suggest you subscribe to their email digest. Really helpful content worth sharing!
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Buffer Suggestions/ Buffer Daily
If you are not using Buffer, I recommend you should. They offer social media management services and an awesome blog to read if you are anywhere serious about Social Media and it’s implications. Buffer takes content curation in its culture and provides 25 suggested articles everyday within it’s application for you to read and share from your social media channels. If you own an iPhone, they got an app you could use and get daily suggestions right on your phone to add to your buffer queue
BuzzSumo is built for the purpose of Content discovery and analysis. Based on the social shareability of the topic, you can choose what’s trending in a certain space and consume. A very handy tool for bloggers and consumers aloke to know what the community is sharing on your favorite domain. You can also run content analysis on a particular topic or find top authors related to those topics.
One of the features you can use is Content Alerts where you can specify rules for an email digest from BuzzSumo to reach you based on a particular topic with minimum number of shares on particular social networks (to gauge the popularity). A very handy feature to discover new content everyday.
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Quora
Quora is not just a Q&A site. It’s much more in terms of knowledge sharing with it’s highly engaged community and guidelines. Quora enables you to follow particular topics and ask questions based on those. A very addictive platform if you follow the right people and the right topics
Still not enough for you? We have got some more which you can check out:
- Scoop.it: Create boards around specific topics and follow experts from your industry
- Storify: Find content in a storytelling format (Or create one on your own and share with your community)
- Triberr: Join ‘Tribes’ which are interest groups with your fellow network of bloggers and share relevant content which can be scheduled on your Twitter channels
- Paper.li: You might have seen their mentions on your Twitter network. It gives you the ability to create your own digital newspaper with the sources of content you specify. Content Curation done easy
- Listly: People love lists. Bloggers love Listicles. Create your own lists of favorites Xs and Ys in a visual format. Share it with your community
- ContentGems: Similar to News.Me. You choose the topics, they send you crafted content based on your preferences in your Inbox
Final Thoughts:
Content Curation is a great responsibility. In this world of content chaos, finding great content to read is only half job done. Sharing it with your community and adding value is what your social community expects out of you. The process can be outlined as below:
Which Tools do you use for finding great content?
Do let me know your thoughts in the comments below and i would be happy to dicuss.