7-Tools-to-Boost-Your-Curation-Skills

“Information Art” by Ray

SEO is not dead. It is constantly reinvented with every Google update and Google ranking is now focusing on content marketing practices. This is why content is key. Most importantly, today.

The world is now filled with writers and bloggers – the new publishers – who share their own personal opinions and experiences about specific topics to engage directly with an audience. Either for personal or commercial purposes.

Sharing quality content has become a decisive marketing practice for this fast-paced social networking world. Sharing fresh content regularly to be recognized as a thought-leader in your field, to get noticed, to connect and engage are the daily musts for marketers.

But discovering great content to share can be very time-consuming. You need to read before you share just as you think before you speak as it is important to make sure that what you share is interesting, relevant and well-written for your audience.

Moreover, discovering great content comes in handy for inspiration. When you have to write on a daily or weekly basis, coming up with great ideas to produce content can be challenging (the so-called ‘writer’s block’), but there is a deadline and you have to make it on time.

Blogs, online magazines, online newspapers, social networks are amazing sources of information, but it’s not easy to find what you are looking for with all the buzz.

Google seems to have no limits in terms of searching and finding, but you can spend hours and hours searching and reading, this is why content curation tools have become so popular lately. A combination of feeds, tags, and social sharing can make your curation/sharing tasks a lot easier for you every day.

Over the last few years, I’ve tried different types of content curation tools and I have found that some display better results than others so here is a list of my favorite ones:

1. Flipboard:

My favorite! This social news magazine, beautifully designed for iOS and Android users, helps you collect all the information that is being shared with you across your social channels. You can also create your own magazines with the content that you find in others’ collections.

You can find here all the main magazines, newspapers and blogs RSS feeds so you can flip through them, like you would on a magazine, grab all the news in real time and share them across all the main networking sites on the go!

2. Feedly:

I started using Feedly as an alternative when Google Reader was discontinued. Feedly offered the option to import all your Google Reader feeds and categories and was later on integrated with other social platforms such as Mention, SproutSocial, Evernote, to name a few, and of course with all the major social media networking sites for easy sharing.

I still use it, especially for working purposes. It has a clean and beautiful layout on mobile devices and you can easily add RSS feeds of your favorite magazines, blogs, newspapers, etc.

3. Pulse

I met Pulse right after Feedly and before it was acquired by LinkedIn. I don’t get many results and options as I do on Flipboard so I don’t use Pulse as much as I used to. However, it has been fully integrated with LinkedIn’s publishers’ site and now you can receive your connection’s articles via Pulse and receive notifications. This makes it really easy for real-time interaction on LinkedIn.

4. Google Alerts

I guess I’m old school. I still use the keywords Google Alerts’ system as another source of information. I do this specifically for “listening” to find out what is being said on the Internet about a brand, a specific topic, a person.

You receive your alerts daily and comfortably in your Gmail inbox, although not as many as…

5. Mention

I was looking around for an alternative to Google Alerts as I felt I was receiving only a fraction of the actual results of the keywords that I was using for monitoring, when I came across Mention. Still today, this is my first choice when it comes to “listening” monitoring tools.  I also use it as a curation tool and it has proven to be very powerful on paid versions. There is a free version too that works well but doesn’t allow as many keywords as the paid versions do. But as far as prices go, compared to other monitoring tools, they are pretty convenient.

6. Pinterest

Being one of the largest and most popular platforms for gathering content, and with a beautiful layout of amazing photo collections, Pinterest allows users to create pin boards for classifying content in a clean organized way and find great content from other Pinners too!

It has become the number one place to look up for recipes, inspiration, travel, art, and photography.

Bonus: Pocket

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is one of my most precious findings: Pocket. This is where I curate my curations… so to speak. Pocket is a tool where you can store absolutely anything that you bump into: images, articles, news, videos, anything. It has an extension for browsers and an app for mobile devices to easily “share” anything in your Pocket while you’re navigating.  You can also organize all your stored findings with tags. This is the place where I keep all those really important things that I will need to come back to later on.

While living my life online, I also resort to everything that social networks have to offer for content curation: Twitter hashtags, LinkedIn search tool, Facebook search, Paper.li, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Instagram and the list goes on.

But to get the most out of these curation tools and make it easier to digest all the information being published every second, just try connecting all your social networks to the curation platform of your choice for keeping and sharing the content that you find in an easy, one-click way. And share away!

Ready to share? Click on the social sharing buttons below.  Ready to share more?  Browse through interesting articles on MGR News & Tips.

Thank you for sharing!  🙂