If you are active on social networks, you probably share all types of content: videos, articles, and pictures and you want your network to see what you’ve seen. The problem with this is that the shared content has a limited shelf-life and often doesn’t reach everyone across all your social networks. Wouldn’t it be great to have one place online where everyone can see a summary of stuff you share? There’s a fix for this!
Content curation tools
Curation tools allow you to highlight and publish web content on your own virtual newspaper or web page. Once you have the web page with its own unique link, you can share it with all your social networks and through email as well. These tools provide you with an additional method to promote your own online content or to share a collection of industry news written by others.
How to maximize your message
Think about the impression you want to make: what do you want people reading your curated content to think? Do you want to be seen as someone who keeps up on current events, or becomes recognized as a “go-to source” of helpful information? These are just some suggestions for how you can use these tools, you may have your own ideas:
- Create a site that links to your social profiles and articles referencing you on the web. Maybe its called a “Brag Rag.”
- Curate the best industry articles you’ve read throughout the week.
- Share a collection of articles written about a recent conference or event you attended.
- Share “how-to” articles and videos you think your fellow colleagues would benefit from.
And by the way, if you don’t have your own content or website, these tools create a webpage associated with your name which may help get you found by search engines.
Curation tools
Depending on the tool you use, the finished product can be automatically generated based on your pre-selected criteria or hand-picked articles. Here are four free tools which provide you with different options to meet your needs:
- Paper.li has many features you may be interested in, such as the ability for people to subscribe to your virtual newspaper via email (which is a nice option for the people in your network who aren’t on social networks). Additional features include automatic publishing (either daily or weekly) using updated content, statistics on users to see how many people are viewing your paper, and the ability to embed the newspaper on your own site or blog if you have one.
- RebelMouse is relatively new and still in beta. You’ll notice their website is a summary of their content and it functions like their product. RebelMouse boasts that its curation tool acts as a social website and showcases the content you want to share. Each article is visually depicted and summarized and when you click on the article, it links to the full article or page. You can set up RebelMouse to automatically find and publish the content you share on many different social networks.
- Scoop.it enables you to create a webpage with the content you flag (or scoop). When you find something great you want to share, hit the “Scoop.it” bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a button that you can add to the toolbar of your web browser. There are four different ways you can source or find content to manually select for your page. Scoop.it even lets you input your own content, so if you don’t have a blog and have opinions or thoughts to share, this seems like a clever alternative.
- If Twitter is your social network-of-choice, then you should know about Twylah. You can create a summary of collected tweets by specifying Twitter lists, keywords or your own stream as content sources. Your Twylah page automatically displays the topics you tweet about most, creating a visual summary for others to see. This is a great way to collect what you’ve shared on Twitter with people in your network who are not active on Twitter.
Visual content
What makes these online summary pages interesting is that they use images from the content to catch the reader’s attention. The use of images is on the rise and a trend predicted to continue due in part to the growing use of mobile devices, time-strapped lives, and because there is just so much stuff out there to read.
Do you use any of these tools? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
