If not, you should be! At Quantus Creative, we will tell you that content marketing is 100% about sharing content. What may not be as obvious to all local business owners is that 100% of the content doesn’t have to be created. Also known as “content curation”, is created by someone else and can be used for marketing purposes.
The key word with these marketing tools is ‘curation’- you should not just post any old content on your business’s Facebook or Instagram feed and cross your fingers that it works.
Instead, as a business owner, you need to review current content found online and choose the pieces that will grab your target audience’s attention. After you’ve found the right piece of content, put your touch into it so that it builds your authority in the industry and provides real value to your followers. Complicated? No, it doesn’t have to be when you use the following resources and tools:
An organizational content market tool, Pocket is an app that keeps track of many different articles, images, and videos that you have bookmarked here and there by putting them all in one place. This makes it easier to find the content you’ve saved. This app also integrates with over 500 additional apps, and you can use it all as it suits your needs.
The key takeaway on this app is it will eliminate the outdated favorite articles, images, and videos you bookmarked. It helps you stay on top of the industry news and keeps you looking like an industry authority.
Twitter Lists
If you check your Twitter feed during the day, you probably know what Tweets quickly come and go. It can be difficult, almost impossible, to miss important and interesting content, unless you use Twitter Lists.
Twitter Lists organizes companies and people that you follow by category. This makes it easier for you to access their Tweets. And a bonus to using Twitter Lists is that it integrates with Pocket!
Scoop.it
For less than $70 a month, the tool Scoop.it is a great help when you do large amounts of content creation. Scoop.it is a tool that searches the internet, grabbing content related to your industry and presenting it to you for selection of what you want to post, with your own unique touch.
It sorts by relevant articles and links and even makes suggestions for other users of this app. This is the key feature to scoop.it – it makes content curation easier.
Sniply
We all know that having a call to action in any content you post is imperative! Another paid tool is Sniply, with one significant difference from the other apps we’ve mentioned: it doesn’t help find content to curate. Instead, it adds a CTA automatically to any curated content that you want to share on your social media pages.
That CTA gives your current followers and your potential customers a direction to follow. That CTA can be the difference between converting prospects to customers that provide you with a healthy ROI with this inexpensive investment.
Quuu
Free is always better, and Quuu is another free tool that will use parameters you determine to pull curated content that fits your needs. Then, you can browse through those recommendations to select the content you want to share on your social media.
But there is more to Quuu! Not only does it find and recommend content for you to use, it integrates with several social media scheduling tools. This can help you by scheduling ahead of time when to post to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. That means you can set aside time to plan what you want posted and it takes it from there.
Facebook Pages Feed
And we can’t forget that Facebook has a free tool at your disposal too! To use this tool that every business should be using, follow these three steps:
- Click on the menu “Pages Feed” located on the right-hand side of your business Facebook page.
- Type in the name of a business, page, or publication that you want to follow.
- Then click the follow button.
Now, the posts from the pages you follow will appear anytime you click on the Pages Feed. This makes it easier to share posts with a comment and most important, a call to action. A downside to this is posts can’t be scheduled here, only shared. There is a work-a-round though! You can click on the URL and copy it, then create a post that is scheduled later for your page.
Feedly
Feedly doesn’t find content that applies to your industry interests, but it can help you collect the accounts and websites you follow into one convenient RSS feed that is accessible from anywhere. After you add a social media page or website to a Feedly account, the content will show up on your feed from your computer or any mobile device.
Curata
Curata goes to a new level of finding content by combining bookmarked sites, keywords, and other tools and scours the web to identify content that focuses on industry-related content that your target audience finds interesting. Curata’s price can vary based on your usage. Curata does offer a free demo and will provide you with a quote.
Publish This
Publish This uses a sophisticated algorithm much like Curata to identify, collect, and suggest content that you may want to share. Additional steps that Publish This also include:
- Sharing the original content that you have created.
- Sharing curated content from Publish This or your own content.
- Tracks analytics for the industry-related original and curated content that you share.
Publish This goes a step further by allowing you to share and track the industry-related content it finds.
In Conclusion
It is time-consuming to curate content when you do it link-by-link. With the resources and tools we’ve discussed here, it is much easier and faster. Give Quantus Creative a call and let us review these tools with you to find the one that is best suited for your business!
