15 powerful content curating tools that will keep your blog and social media vibrant

Original content is great. You feel good creating it, and you have something fresh, entertaining, and/or useful for your readers and followers. It’s probably the most fun part of a digital marketing campaign.

But here’s the thing – producing that original content day after day means that you could be sacrificing other important aspects of your business to keep your presence up-to-date. If you are not in a position to hire content creators, then you have to find other ways to meet your schedule of postings.

Enter – content curation. The dictionary definition is “to sift through, pull together, and select for presentation.” This is actually pretty accurate.

When we curate content, we are sifting through related content of others, especially influencers, and sharing that content in several ways.

Some examples could be reposting an article that someone else has written (with their permission), sifting through important content and collecting it for an original post of your own, or finding topics and improving what others have written about them.

Benefits of Content Curation

You have a business. Let’s say it is an interior design company. You have a blog and social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

You write and post a lot. For a one-man show, this has just become too burdensome. But you know that you have to keep to a publishing schedule if you are going to keep readers following you. You have lots of knowledge to give, but you don’t have lots of time.

Let’s face it – coming up with topics on a daily basis has become almost unmanageable.

Curating content will significantly ease your pain. You can give your audience great pieces of content, and reading other content will also give you great ideas for your own writing.

Just remember this: copying content will get you in trouble, so use other content as a means for getting inspiration to write your own.

Here’s a quick recap on the ‘hows' of content curation:

Quick Takeaways:

• Content curation can cut down your time working on overall content marketing

• Creating systems that focus your time and resources on the accounts that are most likely to close will save you from wasting said time and resources

• Setting aside time for team alignment will help accomplish your overall goals

Making Curation Easy

Certainly, you can do a Google keyword search to find content on topics that relate to your niche or the niche of a client for whom you are writing. This is where most others are also looking, and a lot of content doesn’t show up in such a search.

But what luck! There are some of the best content curation tools out there that will ease the marketing challenges ahead of you.

Here are 15 of the best curation tools for you to use.

1. Feedly

A sophisticated blog and RSS feed reader, Feedly pulls content from all over and places it in a nice neat file for you, based on your keywords. You can have several files if you are writing for several clients.

2. Quora

The great thing about Quora is that you can search by keywords and find questions that are being posed related to your niche and the answers that have been given. Easily find hot topics for your business and some great answers from which to create your content.

3. Trap.It

This is a storage tool but it is very cool. When you find articles you like but don’t have time right now, store it in Trap.It. From there, the tool will seek out more content for you related to the content you already have stored and place it in organized folders.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn can deliver you curated feeds from other businesses and interests in your field. This one isn’t a search tool, but maintaining a follow list of content creators will give you easy access to the best content for your clients too.

5. Quuu

Set up filters and ideas that relate to your niche. This tool will provide a constant stream of hand-picked content for you to scan and sort through.

6. Pinterest

Here, you can follow other people in specific niches and get some great content ideas. This website is especially helpful because of the amount of independent bloggers. Having outside-the-corporate-box content to study is helpful when you’re stuck.

7. SmartBrief

SmartBrief is a fantastic resource for finding quality content for all kinds of subjects. With sections on education, finance, marketing, and more – SmartBrief makes it easy to track down quality content for your client base.

8. Scoop.It

This tool lets you curate content, but also lets you connect with others who are also creating content in your niche, usually influencers and/or leaders.

9. Pressly

This is another “intelligent” tool. You can save content that you like for later reading. Based upon your picks, Pressly seeks out other related content and places it in your account.

10. Learnist

Another “smart” curation tool that will pull content based upon your keywords. Get content from niche leaders that is the most up-to-date out there.

11. Storify

Look through the storyboards that others have created for their marketing campaigns and get some great ideas for content. Heck, you can take good content, massage it, add to it and create your own storyboard. There is also a WordPress plugin for Storify.

12. MyCurator for WordPress

Speaking of WordPress, this is a plugin that will pull in articles from all over the web based upon your keyword preferences. This is an easy one to integrate if your business already uses WordPress regularly.

13. Content Gems

ContentGems allows users to search for content by specific keyword combinations. This tool is especially helpful if you know the exact kind of content you’re looking for, or if your target content is niche in nature.

14. Triberr

Here you will group in your niche areas of interest. Join a club or more and begin to curate content to send and receive content. This will put you in touch with industry leaders and build rapport with colleagues of similar positions!

15. Curata

If you are really busy, this is the tool for you. It searches through blogs in your niche areas and gives you lists for you to sort through. You can scan through content and curate what you like.

There are obviously too many tools for you to use all of them consistently. Try them out and find a few that work for you. Besides that, you can go to blogs and social media platforms of others who are in your niche. Happy curating!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? What luck! Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.