As someone involved in marketing, you know that maintaining a social media presence is absolutely essential to the success of any marketing strategy. Of course, this means that as a social media marketer, you’re probably updating your business’ social media pages every day, with new, relevant content. And if you’ve been at it for long enough you also know that good content can be hard to find on an everyday basis.
This is where content suggestion apps can help out. With curated content from hundreds of sources, they allow you to post content regularly to your social media page more easily. Best of all, they even let you do it quickly on a tablet or a phone, which means that you can ensure your product, service or brand is alive and well on social media while you’re on the go.
Here are a couple of content suggestion apps that can help you quickly find content to keep your social media campaign going:
1. DrumUp
DrumUp is a smart content curation app that uses advanced machine learning and Natural Language Processing algorithms to help you discover relevant content for your social media pages. You can review the content stream and schedule your content for multiple accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Ideal for on-the-go marketers, the Android app allows you to manage your content almost entirely from a smartphone or a tablet.
On DrumUp, you can pick the number of times you want to post during the day, and the app automatically posts for you during the high traffic times for your time zone. If you want to choose a custom time that is also possible by clicking on the calendar icon below each queued post.
The “queue” interface in DrumUp is what makes the app so easy to use, because it shows you all your scheduled and upcoming posts in one place. It’s also where your discovery settings come into play, so it is populated with relevant content depending on your keywords.
DrumUp’s unique feature is the Negative Keywords one, which allows you to refine your search results even further, ensuring that you get exactly the content that you want. With a highly relevant queue of articles to choose from, you can save valuable time by only going through articles that recommended by the tool, rather than going through piles of content on the web. To change the queue, all you have to do is tweak the keywords.
DrumUp also lets you add custom posts to your queue so that you intersperse curated content with some original work of your own. Adding original content every so often is very important, and DrumUp offers an easy way to do that by letting you custom posts. An easy-to-use app with enough features to make it very useful, DrumUp is a great content discovery and curation tool.
2. Klout
Klout is a fun little tool that is particularly helpful, because it has a hassle-free “topics” search criteria that populates your Suggestions bar. While not as accurate as keyword searches, topic searches sometimes pull out content from unexpected sources that could be highly relevant too. The topic-based approach allows you to introduce new search parameters, which makes Klout a helpful tool to use along with a tool that conducts keyword-based searches. The combination of the two approaches ensures that you get maximum coverage of all the content that is available on the web.
Klout’s social scheduling feature allows you to schedule posts for a specific day or time, which is a useful way to make sure that you’re content gets shared when it needs to, even without you having to post it yourself. This way, you’ll be able to schedule your posts weeks in advance, and have your social media campaign running even when you cannot run it for a short while.
Not only does the scheduler allow you to line posts up for posting at specific times, it also lets you know when your audience is most likely to be active. With this simply form of analytics, it allows you to pick the times at which people are likely to see, and read, the content that you post.
Klout works with multiple social media platforms, though it can only manage one profile at a time on any of these platforms. It’s still a useful tool for a single business and can make media curation much easier.
3. Scoop.It
Scoop.it also allows you to find content through topic search, and populates your dashboard with relevant results. From the suggested articles, you can choose the ones that best suit your needs and “scoop it”, to be shared through your social accounts. Scoop.it also allows you to add tags to curated content so that you can find it easily and re-tag it to make it hyper-relevant to your page.
If you’re running into a wall while trying to find new topic ideas for content, Scoop.it also provides you with “Recommended Topics” and “Recommended People” tabs that allow you to look at what the Scoop.it editors would suggest as good content ideas. This means that you can ride every topic wave even as it’s ebbing, and are able to broaden your search easily.
If you’re having trouble optimizing your content, Scoop.it also provides resources for first-time marketers and more experienced folks who just need a refresher. Located in the easily accessible resource center, information is available regarding SEO, optimizing your content and effective content delivery mechanisms.
Scoop.it also comes with its own analytics that can help you see how effective your posts are, and tweak them if necessary to get better results. It also links you to google analytics to figure out how your online content is doing. A comprehensive app, though a bit tricky to use for first time marketers, Scoop.it can make it easy for you to discover, curate and share content.
4. Spundge
Spundge is an interesting curation tool that uses notebooks to help you find and manage your content. With discovery tools available within the services, as well as the ability to add pages to your notebook even as you’re reading them outside the tool, Spundge allows for a fully customizable content delivery experience. The tool’s bookmark button, allows you to add any page you are reading to your notebooks simply by clicking on it. As a result, every time you stumble upon some interesting content, you’re immediately able to add it to the app.
The in-service search tools enable you to find relevant stories, notebooks and other users by using a search term. The ability to see how others curate their content and use previously curated work to help with your own content needs makes Spundge a useful tool to have around.
Spundge also allows teams to work on content curation, which can be very effective for larger marketing strategies or campaigns. Within the notebook tab on the left, you can add contributors to your notebook, enabling others to add relevant stories. You can also post individual stories or the notebook as a whole on social media platforms if you want to share all of your curated content at one time for any reason.
With SpundgePRO, you can purchase organization tools and it enables you to syndicate the original content that you create using the platform. The tool allows you to create and protect original content quickly, which is a useful feature in the current, content-heavy web environment.
5. Feedly
Feedly is a great social content curation tool that helps you post to Facebook and Twitter, amongst other social media platforms. Feedly works on a relatively simple premise – you add blogs or webpages that you follow, and it organizes all of the stories into one feed, on a day-to-day basis.
Feedly is good for content curation based on topic. If you want to browse different topics and find content that works for your brand, Feedly helps you do just that. It also allows you to share stories from your feed directly on social media, enabling you to post as soon as you find something interesting. If you want to save something for later, Feedly has a handy “Save For Later” folder where you can store articles and post them manually at a later time.
Feedly also allows you to tag the articles, which provides some branding flexibility to you as a marketing professional. It also allows you to create easily organize-able folders in which you can store all articles under the same tag. More customization options are available with the Premium version.
These tools are just the tip of an awesome iceberg that is content curation tools. Which other ones do you find useful?
About the author
Jessica follows the social media and content marketing space closely, and writes about it extensively. She represents Godot Media, a leading copywriting services firm.