Why Content Curation is Relevant Today and a Bonus List of the 10 Best Free Content Curation Tools
Whether you’re a marketing manager, business owner, blogger, or social media personality, it can be tricky to find the time to create all of the content that you want to share. While you can turn to content marketing services to take some of the strain off your back, these might not yet be within your budget.
This is where content curation comes in.
If the first thought that comes to mind when you hear “curation” is organizing and displaying museum exhibits, then you’re not far off understanding what content curation is and how it can benefit your business.
Except, instead of organizing a physical collection, you’re organizing the flow of valuable, high-quality information.
What is Content Curation?
Content curation is the process of finding, organizing, and sharing content from external sources.
Social media makes content curation the easiest it’s ever been, as you can share valuable content at the click of a button.
It’s so easy, and such an ingrained process, that in a 2012 study, 95% of marketers said they’d curated content in the past six months, with some stating that they did so without knowing it.
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Benefits of Content Curation
As we talked about earlier, one of the primary benefits of content curation is that it fills the gap when you don’t have time to create your own content. If you’re known for producing content regularly, but find yourself in a position where you can’t publish new content as much as you’d like, then content curation can help you still bring value to your audience.
Let’s take a look at some of the other benefits of curating content:
Curated News Establishes you as a Thought Leader
By sharing relevant industry news, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche. However, this only works if you share content from valid and reliable sources, and those sources are accessible to your audience. Curating news content in this way builds trust and credibility, both with your customers and with other businesses who may want to work with you.
Content Curation Builds Your Brand
If your brand is built on operating from an ethical or moral code, then curating content can help set you apart from the crowd, and it gives you scope to challenge the status quo. It also helps to re-establish the principles you do business by if you’re seen to be sharing content that agrees with your business practices, and even if you share content for the purposes of disagreeing with it.
Curating Content Builds Industry Connections
Sharing industry-relevant content can help build your credibility as part of your industry or niche, particularly if you’re a smaller business or have just started operating in your chosen industry. Not only that but by tagging the original content creator, it can help build connections with industry influencers and professionals. Sharing their content and commenting on their thoughts is a great way to bring exposure to the voices that you trust, but you could also find the favor being reciprocated the next time that you publish your content.
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How to Curate Content
There are multiple ways to go about curating content to share on your social media feeds; however, the process we always recommend people follow is the Seek-Sense-Share model. This model was put forward by Harold Jarche, a networking and collaboration consultant, and it’s easy to follow if you’re just getting started with curated articles.
Step 1: Seek
At this stage, you should start building a network of trusted sources that you’re happy to share information from. You need to research the validity and reliability of your sources at this step, as you want to make sure you’re not spreading misinformation or any other content with a bad reputation that might reflect poorly on you.
Once you have a list of trusted sources and influencers, then you can start filtering down their content to find information that’s relevant to your audience, as well as things that you can comment on to share your knowledge.
Step 2: Sense
With your curated articles ready to go, it’s time to assemble them into the order that you’d like to share them. How you organize your information is up to you, but if you’re not sure how to get started, here are some ideas to get you going:
- Is there a recent development that you can share and comment on?
- Do you want to have certain days where you discuss certain topics with your readers?
- Are there important dates in your industry that you need to cover?
You should also seek out industry insights during this stage. You can go to industry experts, colleagues, friends, family, or even test out the curated content that you’ve picked on your audience to see how they respond.
Step 3: Share
If all went well in the previous step, then it’s time to start implementing your content curation plan.
You can start sharing content on your planned days and times, allowing you to embed a new way of thinking with your audience, sharing different opinions, and solidifying your position as a thought leader in your industry.
What to Avoid when Choosing what Content is Curated
With all this in mind, there are things that you need to watch out for when you’re scouting content for curation, such as:
- Hateful content. This should go without saying, but if you’re not careful to vet your content, you could be sharing information from sites and people that promote bigotry and hate.
- Unreliable authors. Some content may be created by people who aren’t as expertized in your industry as they make out or are downright scam artists.
- Paywalled content. Not all of your readers will be able to afford to pay to access content, which only serves to remove them from the conversation. Be fair to all of your readers and share free content where you can.
Bonus: Ten Best Free Content Curation Tools
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Our content curation tool not only comes with free trials on our paid versions, but we also offer a completely free plan that lets you test out our software without handing over a single dollar.
The free plan allows you to schedule up to three posts a day on a single social media account, and it’ll even suggest hashtags and users to tag in your posts for maximum engagement and exposure. You also get access to the DrumUp mobile app, Chrome extension, and Slack extension, making it easy to share content that you know your readers will love.
However, if you need something more powerful, our paid plans start at $15/month, giving you more functionality and flexibility with what is curated.
To learn more about DrumUp’s content curation tools, head over to our Pricing page.
This is a classic content curation tool, allowing you to build visual lists of content that you think your readers will love. It’s perfect for sharing infographics and blog posts, and you can even link Pins back to your website.
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to schedule content across your social media accounts, meaning you can post curated articles during times when your audience is most likely to be active. It also shows you what people are saying about you and your brand, so you can reply directly to them, and you can set up topics to track so if there’s new content posted, you know about it immediately.
- Goodbits
This software works in conjunction with MailChimp, helping you to create newsletters with your curated content linked within. It also helps you capture and store links as you’re browsing the internet, so if you find content you want to share in your next newsletter, it’s ready to go.
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LinkedIn’s dashboard will show you if a friend or contact is mentioned in a news article, and it’ll also send emails to let you know. This means that, if you share content on LinkedIn and tag relevant industry connections, they’re more likely to see you and your opinions.
- Feedly
The successor to the Google RSS Reader, Feedly helps you keep track of your RSS feeds, suggests new feeds and topics to follow, and even offers a search engine to help you find additional sources.
- Pearltrees
Pearltrees is a visual content curation board, which allows users to create “trees” of related content by uploading links. You can also upload your notes and images to the board. This is a powerful tool if you want to share a lot of sources on a certain topic with your audience, or simply if you want to collect your thoughts and the content you want to curate in one place.
This simple tool lets you collect articles, videos, news stories, or any other form of Internet content, so you can remember to share them on your social media or save them to read later. It comes in the form of a browser extension, but you can also use it alongside other social media platforms.
- UpContent
If you don’t have time to browse through dozens of pages of search results, UpContent can help you filter news articles and blog posts by relevancy, recency, and depth. With this tool, you can quickly find high-value content to share with your audience.
10. Shareist
This powerful app lets you capture bookmarks and ideas as you browse the Internet, so you’ll never forget to share what’s important with your social media followers. You can set it to repeat and recycle links to content if you’ve not shared anything new recently.
Content Curation and DrumUp: In Summary
If you’re looking to build a content curation system to build engagement with your audience, improve your brand recognition, and solidify your reputation as a thought leader in your industry, DrumUp’s content curation tool is the perfect solution for you.
Not only can you try our software for free with our basic plan, but all of our premium plans come with a 14-day free trial so you can find the plan that’s best suited to you. Whether you’re a blogger looking to keep their feed active, or a marketing manager who handles multiple business social media accounts, our software can help.
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