: Jessica Davis, Godot Media ::
Is your social media presence lagging? Are you finding it difficult to find and curate content to make your social media presence robust and active?
With the increasing popularity and effectiveness of content marketing, and with marketers understanding how important it is to create a story around a product, a service or a brand, content curation and sharing tools are becoming widely used as they simplify social media management. And they aren't all insanely expensive either. Most content curation tools offer a free version of their tool that is sufficient to meet most social media marketing needs, with paid versions that offer more in-app features.
DrumUp is a great content discovery, creation and sharing tool, which is currently available for free. DrumUp uses keyword searches to find highly relevant content that you can share on multiple social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. DrumUp populates search results from keyword searches in a queue on the main dashboard, and you as a user can select the posts and articles that you want published. By allowing you to edit or delete posts from the queue, and schedule others for specific times, the tool allows you to fully customize all your content recommendations.
DrumUp's scheduler automatically picks high-traffic times for your chosen time zone for all your scheduled posts to go live. However, if you prefer a date or time other than that set by default, you can easily change it by clicking on the calendar icon that appears at the bottom of each scheduled post. You can also add custom posts, along with images to the queue of curated content.
Spundge is a content discovery and curation tool that works especially well with marketing teams, or marketing strategies with multiple collaborators. Spundge's interface works with notebooks. You create multiple notebooks depending on the subjects that are relevant to your business and then start curating content by organizing individual articles into notebooks. You can also look up exiting users and notebooks that have already been curated by other users on the platform.
Spundge also allows for easy curation of content that is found externally on the Web, and not within the service. When you sign up for Spundge, the service will ask you to install a bookmark button. Anytime you come across something on the Internet that is relevant to your business, you can simply click on the bookmark button and the tool's sidebar will show up, letting you save the article to your preferred notebook easily.
Each notebook can have collaborators, so multiple people on your team can add articles to Spundge simultaneously, which increases your cache of content. Though stories can be created on Spundge, it is currently a PRO service and only available on purchase.
Feedly is a feed-based content discovery tool that helps you populate a personal feed with articles from selected topic areas and sources, and also lets you post each of them individually to your social media spaces. It is an easy-to-use app that also lets you save articles to either read and/or post at a later time.
Feedly comes with a built in tagging option that allows you to add tags to articles to categorize them into specific streams. More customization options are made available on the Pro version.
These are just three useful tools that are essential in your social media marketing arsenal, which other ones would you suggest?
About the author
Jessica Davis follows the social media and content marketing space closely, and writes about it extensively. She represents Godot Media, a leading SEO writing services firm.