Let’s face it – if you’re a blogger and you’re not engaging in content curation right now, then you’re in big trouble. These days, most especially, you need to be able to effectively curate the articles, videos, images, and the like that are relevant to your blog if you want to continue giving value to your audience. In a world overwhelmed by information, people tend to appreciate having that one place where they can find the stuff that they want to find. And it has the added benefit of letting bloggers have great blog posts without having to think of something new to write about every day.
But of course, curation can be very tricky and time-consuming. That’s why content curation tools exist.
If you’re a blogger who wants to make the best out of your curated content, you’ll probably want to try the following tools.
Storify
These days, you really can’t talk about content curation without bringing up Storify. The White House and companies like RingCentral are using this to collate information from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites so they can effectively share stories and discussions focused on certain topics. Given the fact that most of the content that people care about these days are on social media anyway, it’s important that bloggers at least try to look into using this for curating content. It also helps that Storify is VERY easy to use – all you need to do is drag and drop the information you want, and then organize them.
List.ly
One of the most popular forms of content these days is “list type” content. With so much information available for people right now, people are more likely to gravitate towards stuff that they can easily scan. And what’s easier to scan than a list? List.ly lets you name your list, include relevant tags, and put in all the items you think that list should consist of. If you want, you can even add links to each list item’s source! After that, you can structure and re-structure your list before you start sharing it with other people – through email, social media, and your blog. It’s content curation at its finest.
Pearltrees
If you’re the type who likes collecting links so you can have great ideas for blog posts based on curated content, then Pearltree is definitely going to be your cup of tea. For some people, content curation is more than just collecting and organizing the information you find on the Internet – it’s putting your own spin on the information that you’ve collected. Apart from links, Pearltree lets you collate and share photos and notes relating to your topic of interest. Once you have that going for you, you can create awesome content that your audience wants to read.
There are, of course, other tools that you can use to curate content. But these three are the favorites in terms of organization and ease of use.
Are you curating content for your blog now? What content curation tools are you using?
