The last few years have seen companies increase their content marketing efforts in order to better generate interest in their brand. As a result, marketers have needed to improve their content curation skills in order to provide relevant information in a timely and effective manner.
Eileen Mullan succinctly defines content curation as “the act of discovering, gathering and presenting digital content that surrounds specific subject matter.” This requires a significant amount of organization, creativity and inspiration in order to curate on an ongoing basis. Fortunately, there are many tools available that can really help us content curators organize our thoughts and generate great content. Here are some of the top tools that you should have on your radar:
Discovering: Google Reader
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a very useful tool for staying on top of the latest news. Google Reader allows you to easily import or build an RSS feed that pulls the most recent articles from whatever websites you normally check. You can then filter content by website, category or most recent. Articles are displayed in full within Google Reader, allowing you to read all of your content without having to ever leave your feed. Can’t find enough content? Check out the Explore tab in order to see recommended items and sources.
Gathering: Evernote
Evernote is great for taking your scattered thoughts from any of your devices and consolidating them into an organized interface. These can consist of pictures, voice memos, documents (created from within Evernote) and articles, which can then be grouped however the user decides. If you’re feeling particularly lazy, Evernote analyzes your content and organizes it on its own as well.
Their browser extension Clearly is particularly useful for content marketers. After finding an article, you can declutter it from navigation menus, advertisements and other distractions typically on a web page. Users also have the option to highlight important elements and then save these annotations to their personal notebooks.
For group projects, Evernote just released Evernote Business earlier this week, which allows users within an organization to share notes with one another. The app also makes it easy to find relevant information that others have discovered by automatically displaying coworkers’ notes that are related to what you are working on.
Presenting: WordPress
WordPress is one of the leaders in blog publishing and it is easy to see why. They make it easy to create a nice and professional blog without any knowledge of web design. Using a premade or custom template, you can drag and drop features onto your page that range from basic features like categories of posts to more advanced items like social media widgets. For more advanced users, WordPress can also be integrated into other web services for a more customized experience that is consistent with your brand.
Do you use any of the services mentioned above? Got any other ones that content curators should know about? Let us know in the comments below!
