CURATION TOOLS TO CONSIDER
There are so many curation tools on the market you could feel a little lost on which one to pick. The first question to start narrowing down the field is how much curation you intend to do.
The first list below covers enterprise-level curation tools that are able to supply a steady stream of articles, blogs, graphics and video. These tools tend to be heavy on the organisational features in order to manage the vast amount of content involved.
However, if you have more targeted marketing needs, like boosting your social presence or building your reputation as a thought leader with news commentary, the following categories help you design your own ideal content curation strategy. Here are a couple of examples to help you get started:
ENTERPRISE CURATION TOOLS
Curata – One of the most popular curation engines in the business world, Curata guides your search for content with auto-learning algorithms. If you have existing news feeds, import them and Curata goes to work refining your search.
Kapost – This was designed to work with Curata, but it can stand alone as a simple publishing tool. Its intuitive calendar system, channel organization and analytics make it a favourite for marketers.
Aggregate – Build your own online communities around the best content related to any given business segment. Based on audience social signals, the site auto-curates what they like and share. The new collaborative site can be viewed online or emailed out as a personalized newsletter.
Publishthis – Monitor the key concepts and trends in your industry, along with what the competition is up to while you create a site from a combination of curated, aggregated, and self-generated content.
Eqentia – Although there are free and low-priced options, the true benefits of this curation service begins at the enterprise level. Power users will see a personalized news page with drag and drop content boxes and interest categories are broken down by multiple streams and portals.
Bundlr – Behind-the-scenes analytics to help you track the success of each set of curated content. It also allows you to remove the Bundlr branding when embedding the information into your website. Its ability to sync with Dropbox also allows you to pull content from a variety of places. It is available on mobile platforms for convenient use. This clipper tool has a lot of functionality for the business user.
Bundlepost – This simple but effective tool imports content from selected sources four times per day. You can then go through the collected content, select the best, edit for publication and create a posting schedule. BundlePost helps you stay ahead of the game. No more struggling to put together last minute mashups using their highly portable and effective back-office administration.
Roojoom.com – A combination of content curation with sales and training presentation software sets this tool up as an ideal lead generator. If you are planning to scale up from small business to enterprise-level content curation, this is a good platform to take you there.
SOCIAL CURATION TOOLS
Swayy – With built-in hashtags and @handles, this social engagement engine makes it quick and easy to get started with curation. It is designed to find and auto-tweet the kind of articles that your Twitter followers are craving.
Faveeo – The best aspect of this service is its query builder to help curators build sophisticated queries visually with suggestions on the most relevant sources and keywords. It can also help you locate the strongest social influencers on certain topics.
Newspin – Advances in semantic algorithms, social graph analysis and crowdsourced curation have driven the success of this new social curation startup.
Rallyverse – Salesforce integration makes this curation tool a powerful lead generator as well. It works well for coordinating marketing and sales projects.
Meddle.it – This platform allows you to very simply grab a piece of information that your followers will want to see, add your insights and publish across social networks.
LIST CREATION TOOLS
List.ly – Lists have become extremely popular thanks to sites like BuzzFeed. Many readers only have time for top 10 lists and best of posts. Listly makes creating these types of posts a breeze. You can create your own lists or pull information from around the web to generate a photo-rich list that is ready for posting.
Urlist – Educational institutions made this site popular for organizing research and sharing learning tools. Now it has expanded to the consumer market with sharable lists of hard-to-find facts.
Liiist – Lists can be like mini-project management tools. That’s the idea behind this site that makes list-building into a push-button operation.
ZeeF – This site hopes to turn all of the jumbled information on the Internet into a neat and searchable index. Users create list pages around individuals, companies or subjects and then let the user community rank the listing based on how useful it is.
NEWS CURATION TOOLS
Storify by Livefyre – This unique take on content curation encourages users to create a story using images, brief captions, memes and small statements. The visual medium combined with a statement makes these stories very powerful when properly edited. The right combination of images and words can tell a story in minutes that would otherwise take a book to tell. It is particularly useful for the chronological type of content curation.
Opentopic – Content discovery, curation, publishing and analytics are all contained in this comprehensive platform. It tracks the influence of your articles across the web for better message fine-tuning.
Spundge – This free curation site is visuallybased and centers on user-generated “notebooks” for content display.
B2B content engine –Although it is still currently in Beta, this platform has already been building a reputation in the B2B community. There are various levels of service to choose from based on whether you need advanced features like analytics and a newsletter builder.
ContentdJ – The editorial calendar and stats tracking features operate like a simple control panel for your content curation plan. Special content-based landing pages can be generated for posts in all the major social networks.
Shareist – Curation is really a collaborative endeavour, so this site makes it easy to build an inbox for ideas that your team can share in planning out your content strategy. The emphasis is on streamlining the marketing workflow from planning to production to distribution and analysis.
SOCIAL PUBLISHING HUBS
Uberflip – User generated content (UGC) has been a boon for marketers as it lowers costs and improves SEO using keywords that are clearly important to your unique customer base. This platform reaches across channels to aggregate content from social media, your own website and online video into one tailored brand experience.
Pressly – Expressly for mobile-optimized content, this hub is design heavy in order to make your content feel more like a glossy online magazine.
Twine Social – If you need a clean, elegant interface with standout typography and image selections, this site is the one most favoured by web designers. It is designed to help you cross- promote channel partners on your curation site.
Twylah – If your customer base gathers on Twitter, this Twitter-based content curation hub has the most features and least distractions. For those just starting on Twitter, this is one of the best ways to build a following in a hurry.
Kuratur.com – Although still in Beta, Kuratur offers a unique take on social content curation. It allows you to filter content using hashtags, keywords, Facebook pages and other custom indicators. This helps reduce the noise, so you can get to the good stuff, faster.
Rebelmouse – Chosen among the 10 most innovative companies in social media and advertising, this all-encompassing mobile and web curation platform is used by some of the biggest brands in the world, like GE and Burger King.
Stackla – Apply different “skins” to craft the look and feel of each hub. If you don’t see anything that fits among the range of themes, designers are available to custombuild a something really unique.
Pressi – This represents the next generation of curation hubs that collects content from many of the newer social networks like Instagram. The hub hosts on your own domain so readers never have to leave your site to get the latest personalized content.
NEWS DISCOVERY TOOLS
Topsy – A Twitter-centric analysis tool, this company has become so good at what it does that it was purchased by Apple in 2013. Find in-depth analysis of your tweets, the interests of your followers and emerging trends.
Addictomatic – Created by Next Draft, this news search tool is the easiest way to generate a customized page around whatever is buzzing at the moment. This is one of the most effective ways to build thought leadership in real time.
TweetDeck by Twitter – Not to be outdone, Twitter built its own dashboard for visually arranging custom Twitter timelines, lists, searches and activities. Multiple Twitter accounts can be managed in one interface.
Crowdtangle – Using the new Facebook search capability, CrowdTangle gives you a dashboard to comb through hundreds of thousands of profiles to find the content with the highest trending score.
Waywire.com – If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is video worth to your brand? The rise of mobile has made video content even more important. If you haven’t already started including video in your marketing mix, investigate how important it is to your target audience. Waywire helps you find and format curated video to enhance your mix.