This week Swayy.co, my content curators dropped a bomb and said they'd merged with another company, and were closing down my content curation system which I absolutely love - and share with often, with just a few days notice. This left me in a position of having only a few days to figure out where I was going to curate my clients' content from. Eek!
Swayy.co worked on a tag system which was great - enter the keywords, and the system scours the Web for relevant content relating to that keyword. I never really had any other need for much else, but now I do, and on my race to curate great content before Swayy closed, I decided to share my investigations with you and note the ones I've been primarily looking at this week that I think would work well for myself and clients.
FEEDLY
I use
Feedly already and I love this system. I took our free account and upgraded it to the $5 a month version to get the extra features where it searches for stories as well as blogs and feeds in general.
This will most certainly be our primary source for curating content and it integrates nicely with the system I've chosen to share the curated content, which is
SproutSocial. (It was a toss up between
Buffer and I went with SproutSocial because I'll also replace
Hootsuite with it.)
GOOGLE ALERTS
My second source will be
Google Alerts, which is great for getting posts, articles and news topics based on keywords. Many people use it as a reputation management tool, adding their personal name or company name, but you can also add keywords that will bring up some great suggestions for content.
KLOUT
Klout offer a great service that basically pulls up topics you're considered an expert in, and you can share content from those directly in Klout. Just go to Explore, and see what comes up. ..
SCOOP.IT
I've also been impressed with
Scoop.it which has a free dashboard for a single user, so essentially you could set up one for each client, and use the service without a charge.
FOLLOWEDAPP
There's a curator that has a load of other tools built-in that I've recently been testing called
FollowedApp. They have a lot of potential and can perform tricks that other content curators can't. I will be investing more of my time into this system.
STORIFY
I really also like
Storify, I like being able to pick and choose where I want the search to go, for example, I can isolate a search to Google + or a hashtag twitter, then share that from the interface.
It's like anything though, too many tools and you'll end up with a hot mess of 'stuff' so choose the tools wisely, test them out and go with 1-3 systems that produce the best results, then keep it as simple as possible.
I'd love to know what you use to curate content in the comments below.
THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED IN JULY 2015 AND UPDATED IN SEPTEMBER 2021.