Staying relevant in this digital age means brands must step up their online presence. This requires them to have a consistent stream of content that is interesting, substantial, and easy to share with others. However, many brands struggle with providing quality content daily or several times per week.
Top Content Curation Tools:
The Power of Content Curation
What's a solution to this dilemma? Content curation. Brands don't have to fully churn out their own content. There is a lot of user-generated content (UGC) as well as influencer content that can supplement your original posts.
UGC will add authenticity to your overall content marketing. After all, they come from the very people who attest to the trustworthiness of your brand. Sourcing and sharing topics from your very own customers strengthen their relationship with your brand and provide other potential customers a reason to choose your product or service above others.
Aside from UGC, curated content also includes quotes from industry experts, links to a related blog post, the latest news, or sharing a social media update. While there are different types of curated content, the key is to curate effectively. That is, select only the best content for your brand.
Content curation is an important step in ensuring your online presence is effective and results in sales. But it's one of the most complicated steps that marketers have to face. Brands need to strike a balance in showcasing their own created content and complementing it with select ones created by other individuals. The ideal ratio is 60% content creation and 40% content curation.
Is Content Curation Plagiarizing?
Content curation is perfectly legal, so it’s not plagiarizing! Content curation involves collecting and sharing content from a third party and giving them credit for the content or post. The purpose is not to claim other people’s content as your brand’s original work but to broaden the brand’s knowledge base and audience base.
In fact, content curation can help boost authority and SEO for your brand. If you regularly post relevant and high-quality content from credible sources, chances are these will bring positive outcomes for your online standing.
Top Content Curation Tools To Boost Marketing Strategy
Content curation adds variety, authority, and general interest to your overall content strategy. It’s essentially garnering different voices that strengthen your credibility and make your products and service more interesting to your niche customers.
But content curation isn’t as simple as it sounds. If you want to maximize the impact that UGC and other authority content can give, there are tools that help make the process easy. Here are your top 13 content curation tools you can use for your specific brand:
Pocket is a nifty content curation tool that lets you store all bookmarks, images, and articles in one place to organize and nitpick later. Pocket eliminates the confusion—you can simply click the Pocket plugin button whenever you come across the content you want to curate. Since everything gets stored in one area, you can go back to it after scouring the Internet and then decide which content to post for your socials. Pocket is easy to use and integrates with other apps, such as Evernote, for convenient syncing and team access. Curata is a Content Curation Software (CCS) that allows content crowdsourcing from different websites. The intuitive capacity searches content across websites, blogs, social media platforms, and more. Curata can scour the web and categorize content sources. You can use keywords, industry names or authors, news sources, and shared content to search online for the most relevant results. The tool organizes them so that you can incorporate your own thoughts, embed images, and conduct scheduling and sharing of the curated content. Aside from the search and share option, Curata has a proprietary learning engine that fine-tunes the results based on how you rate them. UpContent is an AI-powered software that can suit enterprise-level marketing demands. The tool boasts features that include top web hosting integration, social media scheduling, email marketing customization, and approval workflows to keep all team members up to speed. UpContent can analyze millions of content every single month and bring only the most relevant pieces for your brand. The tool integrates well with existing marketing apps such as Hootsuite, Denim Social, Curate, and Buffer. Flockler is a popular go-to for increasing social media proof and gathering relevant content for your channels. The tool enables customizing hashtags, usernames, and pages scoured from Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and more. Flockler has unlimited layout options for content for whether you want to fix the grid, get a good quality video, slideshow, or carousel format—everything can be searched and then edited on the platform. It also has a moderation option, where your team members can determine if the content in the queue needs more work or if it is good to post automatically. Flockler makes your social media content curation convenient, as it covers everything from searching and organizing relevant content to editing and synchronizing posts on all social media feeds. ShareIt is a free content curation tool every marketer can use. The main mode of searching for pieces is by typing a keyword. All of the most relevant content will show up, gathered from across social handles. Blogs, videos, and posts are also easily found using this tool. ShareIt also allows influencer search, as you get a separate tab to search a list of influencers that can help boost your brand. The option helps you verify which topics are trending because you can check right away if multiple influencers are talking about that particular topic. This app is free, which is awesome, and you can use the brand’s Twitter account to get more content suggestions in every search query. Scoop.it is another easy tool to use for sharing your content, curating related posts, and stamping your authority on a particular topic. The platform lets you aggregate content, publish it, and share it on your own social media channels. Scoop.it has a smart suggestion engine that gives a list of trending content based on your topic of interest. You can find the latest blog posts, news articles, and other content formats depending on your target keyword. Beyond content curation, the tool has a newsletter option as well, which enables you to post one in minutes by letting you edit existing blogs and content based on your custom searches. You get to share third-party content with your own added insights and style. Scoop.it integrates with WordPress for more efficient content creation for websites, socials, and email marketing. TrendSpottr works to provide influencer data about posts and keywords by letting you see recent posts from relevant people or brands straight at the main results page. Marketers can easily review trending content, hashtags, and sources from the top 10 popular topics list. The most popular topics are already available right from the main page, making curation much more fuss-free. TrendSpottr is interoperable with Twitter, as you can view and engage Twitter users with the most trending content. The tool allows you to easily share third-party content to your social networks. TrendSpottr’s Premium option has more capabilities, including research with any keyword or phrase and tracking topics using multiple languages—perfect for global brands. Quuu is another trusted social media tool that allows for accurate discovery and sharing of trending content. The tool does the categorization for you, having an automatic feature that makes it easier to organize content and sift through what’s relevant and what’s not. Quuu optimizes research and provides a one-stop destination for your different content types. From videos, podcasts, and blog articles to photos and presentations, there are endless options per topic of interest. The difference here is that Quuu involves in-house human curation. While pre-set algorithms can certainly boost efficiency, the human component makes Quuu’s hand-curation more reliable in terms of what’s trending. There won’t be any misinterpretations about a particular search query that usually happens with AI-powered tools. Along with the searching aspect, the integrated dashboard allows marketers to curate, evaluate, and share content easily. While not a straightforward content curation tool per se, Sniply also deserves a spot on this list because it optimizes your content. The simple call-to-action (CTA) feature you can put on the page you’re linking to can redirect users to your content. That means that even with third-party content, you can still strengthen the access to your website and original posts. Sniply is essential for monthly newsletters. Aside from providing your clients with the most up-to-date news and developments in your industry, you emphasize the CTA that can convert into actual sales. Flipboard is a desktop and mobile-friendly app that showcases posts via a mini social magazine format. It’s one interesting and artsy way to share links to your chosen blog posts, articles, websites, and news. Flipboard makes third-party content digestible and presentable. While there’s a saturated market for short video content, there is still considerable space for long-form content presented in a user-friendly form. Flipboard does exactly that. The magazine style is familiar to most readers and would attract those who are looking for knowledge on a particular topic. Flipboard balances visual appeal with content relevance. These magazines are sharable to the public, so your niche audiences can follow the content and then share them on their respective social media networks. Elink.io takes the tediousness out of your way when doing content curation. It lets marketers collect content from different sources and share them in a presentable, uniform way. The software allows you to convert links into a web page. These web pages can either be embedded on your website or be sent out as a newsletter for your email marketing campaign. The tool offers over 30 customizable templates that can suit any branding requirement. Elink.io tool can also create widgets for your sidebar, body content, and wherever you want them positioned. As for social channels, the tool has a social bio link feature perfect for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter posting. SocialPilot is much more than just a tool to curate content and offers a long list of social media management features as well. As this listicle is about content curation specifically, we’ll focus mainly on this feature. What makes it such a great tool to use for this use case is that you can search for unlimited keywords. This means that you’ll basically always have a list of ideas for your next social media post. Then, to help you make sense of all these content suggestions, it offers powerful filtering to help you identify the most recent, relevant ideas. As it’s a social media management platform, you’ll also be able to take advantage of powerful scheduling tools in the same dashboard. Not only will it help you to schedule the content that you’ve curated more efficiently, but it also helps you to post it at the right time for better reach and engagement. Considering that a scheduler is an essential tool to have in your MarTech stack, SocialPilot can offer more value than a tool like TrendSpottr that focuses solely on gathering trend intelligence. Trapit is another go-to software that can improve engagement in your different social media networks. The way it works is you can access an intelligent search engine that gathers trending articles and content of all types from around the world. Trapit organizes these results into topic-specific categories. Your marketing team can sift through a mound of information without feeling lost or overwhelmed. The tool also improves as you use it because it records the trapped data you use and guides the search pattern according to your preferred content. Trapit fosters team collaboration with employees’ pre-approved data. This makes the content trustworthy while still giving you, the marketer, control over which content gets shared.1. Pocket
2. Curata
3. UpContent
4. Flockler
5. ShareIt
6. Scoop.it
7. TrendSpottr
8. Quuu
9. Sniply
10. Flipboard
11. Elink.io
12. SocialPilot
13. Trapit
Final Thoughts
Content curation is an essential part of your overall content marketing strategy. Now more than ever, you have to keep your brand’s online presence authoritative, accurate, and the best source of useful info.
With content curation, marketers can take on the challenge of churning out regular content and solve it through research and link-building with relevant influencers and industry experts. Content curation benefits all types of social media channels and creates better engagement. The more attuned your brand is to the latest trending topics, the more your name will outperform other competitors.
But the work isn’t finished with curating. Sharing, optimizing, and tracking posts’ performance are all important steps as well. This is why you have these top tools that allow for all of the tedious work to be done seamlessly in one place. With these content curation tools, you’re on the way to becoming a trustworthy brand that can earn customers’ loyalty.
