GET A FREE CONSULTATION
Posted by Tejas Kirodiwal
August 31, 2013
In the age of digital information, it is vital to curate content, and it is one of the weightiest skills one needs to have in the content marketing circuit. What really makes you stand out, is your ability to find and present it. In the strive to spice up content, it could sometimes become an arduous task if you try to do it all alone. The job of a smart content curator is to make the whole content creation process easier by finding the tools to collect the best material from the best sources on the web and present it in all chastity, which could be savoured by the audience.
Content curation has been recognized as an effective medium to find, organize and share the most relevant topic based on your requirements and keywords. It has proved to be efficient in creating some of the best content by major brands. Rather than writers spending hours and days finding out the most relevant content, curation tools serve the purpose of gathering all the information related to a topic at one stop, making the whole discovery process kind of convenient. In fact, it has become the core part of any content marketing strategy.
Now the question that arises is how we find the most relevant content to store, based on our requirements. Well, there are some exciting content curation tools available, which could make your job and life easier. These tools could prove to be a sophisticated platform and advantageous, regardless of the business size. If you are looking to be a thought leader, it is recommended that 80% of your content comes from reliable sources, which helps in earning faith. Though it sounds good to the ears, it is vital to know that finding and then sourcing the content isn’t done correctly so often. Curating from a broad range of sources will in fact help in getting more depth on the subject which you are looking to write on.
So here are the 5 tools, which if used correctly, could prove to be effective in your content marketing endeavours:
Pinterest is the leader of all the tools for image curators. For starters, this site allows one to pin the images of your interest, which you find on the web. You could create your boards for various themes of your choice. They created boards that could prove to be a great platform for curation projects if the same topic appeals to a broad audience. Though the concept is different, Pinterest takes advantage of the social age very well, so that people could follow you and even share your pinned images with others.
It also offers a bookmarklet that could be installed on your bookmarks toolbar, so that you could instantly pin an image you like on any other website.
Pinterest has slowly and steadily gained the status of being the most popular curating tool. The site is a great way to discover visual content on your screen.
It is a collection of online magazines at one stop, and you could select a niche magazine out of all those available. How to work on it? Simple! You just need to enter the niche on which you would like to collect articles, media and other content to be posted to your account. What you collect, will consist of some wonderful creations in the form of blogs, Twitter content and engaging videos in addition to the various articles and press releases.
The best thing about Scoop.it is that it allows you to have a quick look at the collection of all those people who are interested in your topic, making it easier to find content on the relevant topic and your role as a curator quite efficient. Just like Pinterest, even Scoop.it provides the option to have a bookmarklet, which could be used to scoop all the content that you find interesting. One feature, I think, that businesses and individuals should look at is how it helps in content sourcing.
Just as the name suggests, it is a tool surrounded by lists. This site could be used to create lists on just anything – individuals, websites, images, videos and the list goes on…It is easy to make your list social, visual and quite easy to set up. People can easily vote up or down, add items to the list or even embed a list into their own site.
If you are looking to create a list of almost anything, this is a place to the lookout. It is one of the best crowdsourcing communities enabling people to create lists on any given topic. Say, you want to create a list of the best SEO articles of all time, you could do so. And people will have a look at the same, vote anyone on your list up or down and could also share it on their own website.
A very fine concept that allows you to organize things based on the “tree” method. This is likeable, for its visual interface and how it shows the physical links between various ideas.
You could organize all that you have collected in your own way. Your collection of web pages could be turned into pearls in your account. Based on your interest, you could organize your pearls into pearl trees. You could also use the pearl trees from other users’ to enrich your account. Pearl-trees Teams is a feature encourages social/collaborative curation where various users could engage.
The mission of the company is to help users in cultivating their interests. It is perhaps the only company that gives the users an exposed interest graph.
It is an efficient content curation tool enabling to build of content using social media. UK’s Guardian newspaper has adopted this as a storytelling tool. Reputed brands like HP and General Electric are now using it as a tool to curate and publish.
Storify helps us in searching social networking websites and collect all the blog posts, videos, images, tweets and other content published on social media. The collected content could be organized in your account, integrated with other content and published on social networking sites. It also gives the option to embed the story on web pages. It also facilitates keyword research on various social media websites.
You could actually pick out and arrange content from the various social media networks to come up with an informative creation with a good flow. This could be exported or linked to that creation, to share it with your audience.
In an era where consumers are struggling with loads and loads of information and brands are struggling to win their faith, getting noticed has become one battle in the online marketing industry. It is unavoidable to find value in content curation and take advantage of the same, so as to move with the times, keep yourself updated and creating your own story that is liked by your prospects.
