What is content curation software?
Content curation software is a tool that helps individuals and organizations collect, organize, and share relevant and valuable information with their audience.
Imagine that you are a museum curator. Your job is to curate an art exhibition by selecting the best pieces from a vast collection of artworks and organizing them in a way that makes sense and tells a cohesive story. The content curation software performs a similar function, but instead of artwork, it curates online content from various sources and presents it in a way that is organized, relevant, and valuable to the audience. Just like a museum curator, content curation software helps you sift through a vast amount of information and select only the most relevant and valuable pieces to share with your audience.
Top features to look for in a content curation tool
Here are some key features to consider when evaluating content curation tools:
- Source selection: Your content curation tool should allow you to select a variety of content sources to curate diverse content including websites, blogs, social media posts, podcasts, videos, and news feeds.
- Content filtering: Something not common in all content curation tools, but good ones will help you filter and prioritize content based on different criteria such as relevance, popularity, locality, region, niche, and credibility.
- Collaboration: Big social media teams often need to collaborate while using the same tool, and so they need a common access to resources but from their respective accounts. Content curation tools will
- Customization: The tool should allow you to customize the way content is displayed and organized, such as by topic, date, or source. This makes it easy to discover & share relevant content with your audience.
- Sharing: Could a content curation tool be considered any good if it doesn’t allow you to easily share curated content with your audience through a variety of channels, such as social media, email, and newsletters.
- Analytics: An additional feature to look for is in-built analytics and insights on how your curated content is performing, such as the number of views, total posts shared, best performing content type, and engagement metrics.
- Integration: Of course! This is a quintessential feature. If this is missing, what’s the point? Lol. In fact, the content curation platform should provide support for all major social channels, and embed features for blogs & newsletters etcetera.
Top Content Curation Tools List
1. BuzzSumo – a gem for content curators & marketers
If you are looking for a high-trust & dependable content curation tool, BuzzSumo is the one. It’s a content discovery & research platform to analyze billions of content data points & get a razor-sharp marketing strategy. Their discovery feature allows you to find out high-performing content to help you get more links, likes, and more shares.
Top features of BuzzSumo content curation tool
- High-value content discovery
- Top influencers to help you build your brand
- Analysis of content performance
- Competitor intelligence
2. AdvisorStream – a content curation tool for financial advisors
AdvisorStream is a Canada based startup that helps financial advisor’s curate the best paywall free content from around the world to share & engage with their audience. This is your license to spark new conversations 😉
The top highlights of AdvisorStream content curation tool:
- Niche-focused for people who are giving financial advisory
- Hourly updated content
- You can add your own content
- A team of editors work to shortlist the top content
- Licensed content only, so no copyright & IP infringement
- Privacy compliant as well: CASL, CANSPAM, CCPA and GDPR
- AI generated insights for intelligent & personalized content sharing
- Lead opt-in form for win new leads
- Promote across different marketing channels
3. ContentGems – a no-code content curation tool
Well, most content curation tools are no-code, but this is the one that markets itself with this positioning. Strange. But this tool is good for content discovery and sharing.
Top highlights of ContentGems
- Monitor twitter accounts and any website with an RSS feed.
- Keyword based content discovery
- You can plug curated content into your favorite social media tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Feedly, MailChimp, Slack, Campaign Monitor, and more.
- You can build custom workflows from scratch to completely automate your content curation marketing strategy. Set up once and forget.
4. Alltop.com – a content discovery platform for impatient marketers
Alltop is not really a content curation platform that we seek, as you can’t distribute content using it. But if you’re a marketer who loves quality content then Alltop is your golden goose to catch. It scavenges best of the best articles from niche leading websites and makes it available for you to share using your social media automation tool or content curation tool.
5. Bit.ai – a central content knowledge management tool for enterprises
Bit.ai is technically a content curation tool, but its only source of curation is your own enterprise resources. It organizes your enterprise knowledge database which might be scattered across different channels & platforms under one umbrella. So, you don’t have to keep doing monkey jumping from one browser tab to another searching for that one slide deck that you need to present in the next meeting, which you can’t find it because you don’t know where you saved & stored.
Top highlights of Bit.ai
- Company wiki
- Interactive document sharing & collaboration in the real-time
- Knowledge/Content management
- Design Automation
Who uses a content curation tool?
Content curation tools are used by a wide range of individuals and organizations for various purposes, including:
- Marketing professionals: Marketing professionals use content curation tools to create and share relevant/valuable content with their target audience, build brand awareness, and generate leads. It is real tough to always come up with quality content consistently. And collaborating with brands is a costly deal. Content curation is a simple way to use valuable content created by others for your benefit without infringing any copyright laws.
- Content creators: Coming up with new ideas all the time, esp after you have scaled to thousands of posts and articles is a true pain in the #$$. Content creators, such as bloggers, social media managers, and journalists can make use of content curation tools to research and find trending & new ideas for creating fresh content for their audience. Social media influencers use content curation tools to find and share content that aligns with their brand and interests, and to grow their audience and engagement. It works if done right.
- Educators: Educators use content curation tools to deliver effective learning experiences to learners. They can collect and share relevant and up-to-date resources with their students, such as articles, videos, and podcasts.
- Information professionals: Information professionals, such as librarians and researchers, use content curation tools to organize and share information with their colleagues and clients. They also make use of content curation tools to scrape data from a given niche and process to synthesize actionable insights from it.
- Businesses: Businesses use content curation tools to keep their employees informed about industry news and trends, as well as to share company updates and news with their customers and stakeholders. This helps project you as an authority in your niche, which certainly helps in more deals.
What are the challenges of a content curation tool?
There are several challenges to consider when using a content curation tool, including:
- Sifting through a large volume of content is a pain while using a content curation tool: With so much information available online, it can be overwhelming to sift through it all and find the most relevant and valuable pieces to curate. It becomes highly important that you use a content curation tool which does basic hygiene checkups on its own end to filter out low-quality content.
- Ensuring the quality and credibility of sources: The whole point of curating content is that it’s high-value, credible, and reliable. This can be challenging. Sometimes benchmarking the sources can be a taxing job, as you may not want to give free visibility to your direct competitors. And finding good sources in non-competitive domains which can be relevant to your audience can be time taking. If your content curation tool has a way of rating the sources based on certain criteria, then this issue is resolved.
- Ensuring legal compliance: Depending on the content you are curating, you may need to consider legal issues such as copyright and fair use. It is important to ensure that you are complying with relevant laws and regulations.
Why buy a content curation tool?
To scale your marketing efforts & business ultimately, you must consider buying a content curation tool. The #1 reason I feel, every team should have content curation tools is that it makes your marketing team more effective.
Content curation tools can help your marketing team save time by automating the process of finding, organizing, and sharing content. This extra earned time can be used towards creating valuable content, which can be further distributed by these content curation tools themselves. For example, if you create an investor pitch and upload on a good curation platform, it won’t just allow you to share it across your social channels but also make it available for others to share who may want their audience to see it.
Content curation vs content creation
Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing, and sharing relevant and valuable content from a variety of sources. Content creation is the process of creating new content, either from scratch or by repurposing existing content.
Here is an example to illustrate the difference between content curation and content creation:
Imagine that you are a blogger who writes about personal finance. You want to create a post about the top personal finance apps.
- For content curation, you might search online for articles and reviews about personal finance apps and select the most relevant and valuable pieces to include in your post. You might also include quotes or statistics from these sources to support your points.
- For content creation, you might write your own original review of the top personal finance apps, based on your personal experience and research. You might also include your own tips and advice for using these apps effectively.
In summary, content curation involves collecting and sharing existing content, while content creation involves creating new content. Both can be valuable strategies for creating high-quality content, depending on your goals and resources.
