14 of the best content curation tools to save you time

Do you lack the time, staff, and budget to consistently publish original content? If so, content curation can help you fill this content gap by offering consistent and helpful content to your audience. Content curation is the secret to successful social selling and there are many content curation tools to help you.

What is the definition of content curation?

Content curation is acting like a museum curator sharing the best art in an art museum or a wedding DJ playing the best songs at a wedding. It is the physical act of a person (not a computer) finding and sharing the best of other people’s content. Content curation is when individuals or teams consistently find, organize, annotate, and share high-quality digital content. This curated content covers specific topics that engage their target audience. It has become a critical and integral part of your content marketing strategy, social media strategy, and digital marketing strategy.

What is the sweet spot between content creation and conutent curation?

According to research that explored the sweet spot of how much brands should use content curation vs. content creation, the optimal balance for organizations is a 60/40 ratio of content curation vs. content creation. In other words, 60 percent should be content curation. 40 percent should be content creation. This ideal mix was a result of research that was based on analyzing more than 150,000 social media posts.

Why should you curate content?

There are some key benefits of effective content curation. It helps you:

1. Incorporate outside voices

Content curation can help you show your audience how your content or brand voice fits into the larger picture of your industry.

2. Improve your search engine optimization (SEO)

It can help you create additional website pages and provide content for your social media channels.

3. Grow your website traffic and lead generation efforts

Content curation increases your website traffic, which leads to increased amount of leads.

4. Build your brand awareness

It will help you provide your audience with a constant stream of quality content from a variety of sources beyond just your content.

5. Become a thought leader

Content curation will help you become a “go-to information” source. It encourages your audience to trust you as an authority on certain topics.

6. Streamline your lead nurturing

You can use curated content via your email newsletters, providing you with more content to nurture leads.

7. Add content to your editorial calendar

Content curation helps you supplement your social media and blogging editorial calendar. You are able to share fresh, relevant, and high-quality content with your audience.

Marketers see value in content curation

In fact, many marketers already see the value in content curation with 95 percent of marketers reporting that they share another organization’s content. The problem with content curation is that it takes some work and is a team effort.

1. Anders Pink

Anders Pink curates content for you and your team by crawling millions of websites across the web and then creates daily briefings. You can refine these briefings based on specific keywords. These briefings are updated throughout the day with new content.

Anders Pink helps you gain insights from the crowd so users can vote on articles they like and get notified when a team members flags or comments on articles. With this tool, you can review articles by on most recently published or most shared on the web.

You get helpful analytics because you can see how many articles each team member opens and views in the daily briefings and how much they contribute by voting, flagging and commenting on articles. With Anders Pink, you can create private teams and set up team briefings.

2. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo helps you curate content and identifying influencers who have shared a specific piece of content.

You can search for the most shared content using keywords, find out the most shared content from a specific domain and filter down to specific types of content such as infographics, videos, etc. You can also search by what news is trending in the past 24 hours and what content has been the most shared.

This content curation tool helps you analyze what content is performing best for any topic or for any competitor. You can find key influencers to help you promote your content.

3. Feedly

Feedly is a way to organize, read, and share content from your favorite websites, podcasts, keyword alerts, and YouTube channels. You can access all of them in one place.

It is a useful tool since it has strong integration features with social media channels so you can easily share articles. You can also schedule posts with HootSuite and Buffer.

You can also add articles to a read later section so you can access them when you need. And you can discover fresh content on niche or broad topics. It is always in sync so you can access it on a mobile device or via your desktop computer.

Feedly also has good collaboration features. For example, one of those features is their “shared boards” section so you can work with your team to curate, comment, and prioritize the best articles about specific topics.

4. Pocket

The main goal of Pocket is to save interesting articles, videos, or other web content in your “pocket” to read, watch and/or share later.

Pocket also has a feature that helps you curate content based on specific topics. This feature pulls high-quality content, providing with some of the best articles on the web.

You can also discover content by browsing through major publications, content writers, and content curators. Pocket has an app and a mobile-friendly website so you can access your content from any device. You can even view the content offline if you are on a plane and don’t have a Wi-Fi connection.

5. Curata

This tool is a content curation and content marketing platform for enterprises. Curata has two main software platforms: Content Curation Software and Content Marketing Platform. This tool uses machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence to power both platforms.

It was founded on the premise that machine learning and natural language processing can bring significant value from the tsunami of online content being produced. Curata allows you to discover and share industry content to blogs, social channels, and e-newsletters. It helps you show how your content marketing efforts are influencing your sales pipeline, leads generated and revenue. With a centralized calendar, it can help you coordinate team members, programs, and your content initiatives.

6. ContentGems

This tool is a content discovery engine because it scans articles from a large database of online sources and presents you with a stream of relevant and timely content based on your keywords, social signals, media type, and other filter settings you set up. ContentGems provides you with the ability to share directly to social media, create weekly e-newsletters or put it directly on your company intranet and/or portals. You can also plug your content into a variety of platforms, such as Buffer, HootSuite, Feedly, Slack, and WordPress, to name a few.

7. Zest

Zest curates high-quality content recommended and verified by the pros. They manually approve and publish less than 1 percent of suggested articles from the community. They have a database of 10k+ published articles. The content is sourced content from humans (not computers) and reviewed so you don’t get crap content. Add Zest as a new tab to your chrome browser. In this tab, you can sort by most shares and most clicks. You can filter by tags, keywords, audio, and video. Zest has a team that sifts through the click bait articles online and picks the best. Customize the theme of Zest and the layout to fit your preferences.

8. Quuu

Quuu is also a hand-selected content curation tool. It gives you content suggestions, even if you do not have a ton of blogs and online sources you trust. You select from more than 300 interest categories to get content suggestions. Choose how many suggestions you would like to send to your social media profiles or your Buffer or HubSpot accounts. According to their website, they hand-review more than 60,000 posts every day. And they promise to review each and every piece of content they suggest.

9. Flipboard

Flipboard is your personal magazine. It allows you to curate content from the sources you like and trust. Flipboard presents your curated content in a magazine format and it helps you keep up with your reading in a visually-appealing way. Select your interests and your feed will be curated with articles and recommended stories about those topics. You can also follow other people who have similar interests as you.

10. ContentStudio

ContentStudio is a tool that will help you discover, monitor and share engaging content with your social media channels or upload the content to your blog. It gives you the ability to discover content by social shares, media types and the virality of the content. Select posts individually from your topic feeds or automatically share content based on your rules. You can use their amplification tools to get hashtag suggestions, enhance images and recycle posts. They have a lot of third-party integrations on platforms such as Medium and Bit.ly.

11. DrumUp

DrumUp mines the web using sophisticated algorithms to find content relevant to your audience. In other words, it helps you energize your social media presence with fresh and relevant content. This tool allows you to add multiple social media accounts to the dashboard.

You can schedule and share content on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter through the tool, allowing you to find and share content across multiple social media accounts. The tool also offers a Chrome extension that helps you find and share content relevant to the article you are reading on your browser.

12. Refind

This content curation tool curates content from the people you follow on Twitter and within Refind. With this tool, you discover, save, and read content that’s relevant to you. They analyze thousands of new links and create a magazine for you. They have a Chrome extension that enables you to save links from the web with one click. When search on Google, Refind highlights links you or your friends have saved. You can access your reading list on Refind anytime, anywhere, even when you are offline.

13. Elink

Elink.io can help you save web links and then bundle them together into web link collections for email newsletters. They can also be used for website or blog content, single web pages, and social media bio links. This tool can help you remove hours from your content curation efforts by creating web pages. Or you can embed web links on your website. Or update blog posts in real-time.

Elnk.io helps you save visual collections of web links, articles, cloud files, and social media posts. You can use their Chrome Extension to bookmark and save content anywhere. You can also create your own RSS Feed reader to read and save content.

14. Newsletters

Newsletters serve as a great reminder about making sure you curate content every day. Therefore, if you don’t see something on social media, you can catch up via email newsletters that you subscribe to.

Email newsletters are a great way for news, trends, and tips to come your inbox that you can curate. It is an excellent way to quickly digest a lot of information. Newsletters such as SmartBrief aggregate the top content from across the web in executive summary format. As a result of being such a good resource, ensure your email inbox doesn’t overflow with too many email newsletters that don’t provide a lot of value for you.

What are your favorite content curation tools?

What content curation tools do you use? Are your favorite content curation tools missing from this list? Do you have your favorites?