Content curation means finding and sharing articles, videos, infographics, etc. that are most likely to keep your followers and subscribers engaged. This is one of the ways in which many companies keep up with their social sharing and newsletter planning without working too hard on content creation.
This is also a very useful way of creating a good content mix on your social media pages. Your followers want to know more than just your ideas, your photos and your articles. By sharing curated content, you indicate that you are firmly anchored into your industry or your niche and you know every interesting development taking place.
Finding Quality Content – a Time Consuming Task?
You may wonder: “But how do I find valuable content?” Signing up for newsletters or doing a Google search every day would take just as much time as creating your own content. And the whole point behind this issue is saving time to focus on other business aspects.
This is why content curation tools exist. They act like web crawlers, searching for published content, selecting items that fit your requirements and cataloguing them by relevance and popularity.
So Many Options, So Little Time
If your curiosity sent you directly to Google, you will find dozens of content curation tools, some free, others very expensive. Each of them has their strong and weak points. We decided to look at the most popular tools and select those that are most helpful and relevant for your business this year.
Our selection is:
1. Pocket
Pocket is simple to use, effective and affordable. We like the fact that it is now integrated by default in the Mozilla Firefox browser. It is also available for Mac, Android and iOS phones, as well as for other devices (Blackberry, Kobo e-reader, etc.).
How does Pocket work? Basically, it helps people avoid distractions online by saving interesting links to browse later. But that is not all. Based on your selections and topics of interest, Pocket recommends you other types of content you’d enjoy reading. This gives you the opportunity to discover curated content connected with your niche and business activity.
The Premium Pocket subscription costs US $44.99 per year, or US $4.99 per month.
2. List.ly
List type articles (like the one you are reading now) are extremely popular. You can spend hours researching to come up with a good list and share it on the social media – or you can let List.ly do it for you.
This content curation tools is a must-have for creating and sharing list articles on almost any topic you can think of – from business to music to arts and crafts. Another useful feature of List.ly is the number of platforms it integrates – Google, Facebook™, Twitter and WordPress.
You can use List.ly for free with a limit of 3 free lists for new users, 1 list per week and 10 items per day. The Premium plan costs US $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year and allows you to create unlimited lists plus other useful features (premium templates, advanced moderation, etc.).
3. Scoop.it
Scoop.it is one of the most advanced content curation tools and this is why we still keep it in our list of recommendations for 2019. It has a simple and easy to use interface. The suggestions made by the platform are based on big data analysis and Boolean search for keywords.
Apart from these recommendations, you can also add your own trusted sources of information using RSS feeds. Looking for a specific topic is very easy with the advanced filtering by type of content.
Scoop.it offers a free Personal plan and a Business plan priced at US $14.99 per month (billed annually). The Business plan includes WordPress integration, analytics and branding with custom templates among other features.
4. Zest
Zest takes content curation to the next level. All the suggestions you will see here are manually selected and approved by the Zest team of professionals. This is the best guarantee that you can have that the content you share on your social media accounts is valuable.
What’s more, you can also boost your own content by sharing it with the Zest team. Attention! They state that only 1% of the suggestions they receive pass the quality test, so make sure to send your best and most valuable content.
The only downside we found for this tool is that Zest is available only as Google Chrome integration.
5. Feedly
With its simple, no-nonsense interface and the powerful content selection and curation abilities, there was no way of leaving Feedly out of this list. It has been around for a while and has continuously improved over time.
The free version allows you to find up to 100 sources of content tailored to your areas of interests and create up to 3 feeds. If you opt for the paid version (priced at US $5.41 per month, billed annually), there are no limitations to the number of sources and feeds. Plus, you also benefit from integrations with Buffer, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, IFTTT, Evernote and other business collaboration tools.