The Best Content (Marketing) Curation Tools in 2018
By
Toby Britton
Content curation is one of the most powerful techniques that we have available to us as digital marketers, and there’s a reason for that. Curated content is super effective because it takes advantage of social proof.
Social proof is the phenomenon in which we trust what our friends say about companies more than what companies say about themselves.
That’s why nearly 70% of online shoppers look at product reviews
before making a purchase.
Put simply, content curation allows you to tap into user-generated content to promote your brand much more effectively than you could ever manage on your own. It also allows you to tap into that social proof in a genuine way which builds relationships instead of feeling like a sales message.
With that in mind, we’ve pulled together a few of our favourite content marketing and content curation tools and created this list to help you out.
Here are 13 of the best content curation tools available to marketers in 2018.
1. Feedly
RSS feeds might seem old-fashioned, but they’re just as powerful as they always have been. Feedly has been leading the pack ever since the demise of Google Reader, and there’s a good reason for that. It’ll help you to bring different content feeds into a single place and can act as a dashboard for you to keep your finger on the pulse of what people are talking about.2. Scoop.it
Scoop.it is effectively a tool to help you to create pages of curated content using a single, intuitive interface. Businesses can automate much of the process to create curated content at scale for a variety of different channels. The aim is to use a mixture of clever algorithms and data science to curate more high-quality content than ever before.3. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is effectively a search engine that ranks its results based on the number of social media shares that the pages received. This means that you can add a query and quickly find out what’s got people talking. It can be a great way to create content for a Twitter feed or to come up with relevant news topics that tie in with your industry.4. Miappi
Okay, okay, so we included ourselves on our own list. But there’s a good reason for that. We’re all about making the valuable visible, picking up on user generated content and making it easier than ever to make it part of your content creation strategy. Simply finding the content isn’t enough. If you want it to be effective, you need to display it in such a way that it boosts engagement, conversions and ultimately profit.5. Twitter Lists
Twitter lists are a great way to bundle users together and to make it easier to see what they’re posting. If you combine this with a Twitter dashboard such as TweetDeck or Hootsuite, you can even apply filters so that you only see posts using certain keywords or which have received a certain number of retweets. You can easily retweet, reply to and favourite content in real time.6. Storify
Storify is a freemium tool which is designed to bring in assets from social networking sites and third-party websites and to embed them into a single feed. The stories can be arranged chronologically or by using the drag and drop interface, and you can then share the permalink to that story or embed it into your blog site. It makes it super easy to tell a story through content curation and displaying it in an elegant interface.7. Sniply
Storify is a useful little tool that allows you to add bespoke calls-to-action to the content that you share. That means that even if you’re linking off-site, you can use it as a way to generate conversions. Even if you’re linking to third-party content and news pieces, you can still include a clickable button that links back to your own websites.8. Curata
Curata taps into the power of algorithms to provide a content curation discovery platform. It builds up a profile on its users to get to know where their interests lie and then provides a steady stream of content for review and distribution. Users can easily share this content on blogs and on social networking sites, and it can also be imported into emails and even used to create new content on marketing automation platforms.9. Flipboard
Flipboard essentially allows you to create a personalised digital magazine that only includes the topics you care about. It can be useful internally just to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in your industry, but it’s also a pretty powerful asset to share on social networking sites. Flipboard aggregates data from news sites and social networking sites. It even updates the app in real-time as new content goes live online.10. Answer the Public
This interesting tool is both powerful and visually appealing, which is why it’s perennially popular amongst content marketing teams and search engine marketers. Tapping into Google’s autocomplete data, it provides keyword suggestions based on what people are already looking for. Then it serves up a downloadable image showing the main autosuggest queries and grouping them together into related questions (i.e. “where”, “how”, etc).11. Pearltrees
Pearltrees works as a digital library, allowing you to store web pages, images, notes and more in an intuitive interface. You can drag and drop things to store them and share those collections either within the Pearltrees community or within your content curation team. Think of it as being a little like Pinterest on steroids. It’s also great for collaboration which is why content marketing teams love using it.12. Triberr
Triberr describes itself as a content marketing automation suite and aims to make it easier for influencers and bloggers to improve the reach of their content. It allows you to join “tribes” of like-minded individuals and makes it super easy to reach out to them and to start building connections. From a content curation point of view, it also makes it easy for you to find and share content that’s relevant to your audience.13. Trap.it
Trap.it has multiple different functions and is technically a social selling suite that can be extended across the entire company. Still, it has an excellent AI-based tool that’s designed to help you to find news, insights, trends and analysis. Your marketing team can use it to find new content to share and it can also give you some ideas about what’s hot and what’s not in your industry.Conclusion
Now you know how content curation can help and you have access to our list of content curation tools, it’s your turn. Spend some time thinking about how you can make content curation a part of your marketing activity and then decide which tools you’re going to use to make that happen.Remember that content curation is a valid strategy for a whole range of industries, whether you’re B2B or B2C. If you’re not convinced, just plug in a few keywords that relate to your industry and see what people are saying about them. You might just be surprised!
In the meantime, if you need help with content curation and user-generated content, get in touch. We’ve love to help you to use content curation to take your business to the next level.
