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Curating content for your business’ blog and social media channels is a great way to save time and build a community. Creating your own blog content takes time. Finding articles to share on Twitter and Facebook each day also takes time. When you turn your attention to your community (What blog posts are they sharing? What blog posts are they writing?) you will discover an existing resource of content and ideas that will save you time. Plus, when you shine the light on others through RT’s and links to their blog posts in “Link roundup” style blog posts, people feel like more a part of your process. (And that is what community is all about!)
Remember: content curation isn’t passing someone else’s content off as your own. It’s about linking back to their content, giving them credit for creating something that was thought-provoking for you and sharing that with your community. Deal?
Here is our guide for getting started with content curation:
These are the tools I recommend, which you can find in my Content Curation Essentials Toolkit on oneforty:
PostPost – This is a search tool that lets you search within your own Twitter network for Tweets by keyword. Identify experts on the keywords related to your industry from your own Twitter network to see who you should be RT-ing.
Cadmus – This tool shows popular Tweets from your network – like your own trending topics. This is another tool that will help you identify what topics and links to RT.
Packrati.us – Packrati.us will collect the Tweets you favorite, Tweet and RT throughout the day. This will be helpful for you at the end of the week when you are putting together a “link-roundup” style blog post.
PostRank – You probably have Google Reader overload, right? PostRank fixes that. It analyzes what posts have gotten the most engagement (comments, Diggs, Tweets) across the social web. It identifies the “most important” posts from your RSS feed, surfacing popular discussions you will want to emphasize – or, as we like to say around here, “fire to throw gasoline on.”
Curated.by – See interesting topics being talked about? Create a “bundle” of discussions from the community on Curated.by
Keepstream – Use Keepstream to collect Tweets and Facebook likes about a certain topic to embed into a blog post.
Storify – Storify helps you collect conversations from Twitter and embed them in a blog post. (Note: Some people were concerned about using other people’s Tweets in blog posts because of Twitter’s new screenshot rules, but it looks like this is just to protect people from their Tweets being used for advertising etc.)
What tools do you use? Is there anything I forgot or a content curation tip you have? Let us know in the comments.
