Not enough time to find the best content to share with your audience?
Too many articles to read to keep up with on what's going on in your industry?
Many great tools are available to help you share content. Some are free or low-cost; some, with more functionality and more geared toward the enterprise market, are priced higher.
In this article, I focus on seven low-cost tools that will help with you find and share great content.
1. Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a tool for finding and curating content.
If you join Scoop.it, you create boards around specific topics, and on those boards you add links to content you find relevant to those topics.
You can also follow the boards of others who are actively finding content that could be relevant to your interests. The trick is to find really good curators of relevant content. Why search through all the content when other people are actively curating it for you?
A benefit to using Scoop.it is that if you add your content onto boards, people will follow you and share out your content.
2. PostPlanner
PostPlanner is an app specifically designed for managing content on Facebook.
One really interesting aspect to PostPlanner is the content discovery engine. You enter keywords that are relevant to your industry, and PostPlanner displays recent content that you can sort by popularity (i.e., with the most shares/likes). In the following example, I searched for "Social Media" and sorted content by "most popular":
Within PostPlanner you can then click on the content, read it within the app, and with the click of a button add it to your schedule to deliver on your Facebook page.
3. Swayy
Swayy is a tool just launched this year and has a lot of promise. You specify the categories of content you are interested in, and Swayy will pick out the most relevant content based on its popularity among your fans and followers.
In the following example, Swayy has picked out content that is popular based on the topics I selected:
When you find relevant content, you can then share it on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Swayy has a nice interface, and it does a very good job of filtering content based on your interests.
4. Feedly
Blogs are a great source of good content, but going to blogs each day to find content is time-consuming, and adding more email to our inbox is not always a good idea!
Feedly allows you to subscribe to blogs and view the latest blog posts within the application.
It has a nice user interface and works perfectly on a mobile device. It also supports Buffer, which means you can share content and let Buffer automatically schedule out the delivery.
When you add blogs to Feedly, you can create categories. If you then select a category, Feedly will show you the most shared content within that category—a very quick way of identifying popular blog content.
5. Topsy
Topsy is a powerful social search engine that is great for finding popular content.
You search based on keywords, and you apply filters, for example, to display only tweets.
In the following example, we are searching for popular content related to social media that was shared on twitter within the last hour:
Topsy is a very useful tool for finding popular content.
6. Storify
Storify (acquired by Livefyre) lets you collect media from across the Web, compile that information within a story, and then make it available to anyone on Storify.
You can also embed that story on your website or Facebook page.
For example, imagine you couldn't attend a conference but someone has created a story on storify that includes the most interesting tweets and photos related to the conference—saving you a lot of time reviewing what happened at the conference.
Here's an example of part of a story from Content Marketing World, held recently in Cleveland:
7. Newsle
Newsle discovers when your network connections, or people you are interested in tracking, are mentioned in the news.
For example, you can track what news articles a key influencer in your industry appears in. Newsle will send you a notification they are mentioned in an online newspaper or large blog:
You will be able to track events they are appearing at, blogs that are talking about them, and much more. That information can also open up opportunities for you to reach out to appear in the same online venues or to speak at similar conferences.
Summary
Finding and sharing great content is an essential part of social media. These tools will help you find content to share and will save a you a lot of time.
What are your thoughts? What tools do you use? What are your content-curation challenges?
