Top 8 tools for curating content on social media

As every B2B marketer knows, a social media strategy can’t be effective without content to fuel it. Unfortunately, the majority of B2B companies struggle to create that content. In Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 survey, the top two content marketing challenges that B2B marketers face were:

1. Producing engaging content (54% of marketers)
2. Producing content consistently (cited by 50%)

The answer to this challenge, which many marketers have already found, is curated content – finding, sharing, and measuring the content of other brands to enhance your own social media presence. As early as 2012, 76% of marketers shared curated content on social media.

To keep a regular stream of updates and be seen as a helpful social contributor, much of the content you share will not be yours. However, simply retweeting the first 50 updates in your Twitter feed will not generate the results you are looking for. To curate content effectively, your social media team requires tools that facilitate easy and scalable content sourcing, sharing relevant and engaging updates, and measuring the results of your curation.

Here are eight tools you can use to share other brands’ content in a way that still increases your engagement and, most importantly, generates leads:

Finding content

Feedly

There are 27 million pieces of content shared each day. Sorting through that much content to find the relevant content for your audience and brand image requires a tool to organize it. Our favorite RSS feed reader is Feedly. This tool enables you to easily manage your blog and other RSS feeds from your favorite publications in one place, making them organized and searchable.

Oktopost’s integration with Feedly allows you to curate content from these publications and share it with your social audience within seconds.

Trendspottr

Making the content you share relevant to your audience’s current interests and challenges requires staying up to date on the latest trends and topics in your industry. Trendspottr is a platform that allows you to analyze your social networks and other news feeds for new and emerging trends. This helps you gain the reputation as a brand that is always on the cutting edge of new stories and developments.

Social media (Twitter Lists, Reddit, and Digg)

As the channel where you most often engage with your audience, social media is also one of the best places to find new content to share with your audience. That’s why 79% of marketers use social media to find content for their curation strategy. One of the best ways to organize this content is by using Twitter Lists, which segment your followers into specific subjects and groups, making it easier to find relevant content. Depending on the number of Twitter Lists you utilize, a tool like Tweetdeck or Oktopost’s Social Streams can help you organize these lists. You should also monitor any other social networks you utilize for content and trends. Reddit and Digg are two other social networks dedicated to content curation that can help you find interesting stories.

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Google alerts

Another way to stay updated on any breaking news stories or new, interesting content is through Google. Setting Google Alerts for specific keywords relevant to your business or industry will give you a notification whenever a blog post or other web content is published.

Sharing content

Startafire

Gaining reputation and social engagement are not the only reasons to curate content; 80% of marketers share third-party content to improve company visibility and buzz. To fully capitalize on the engagement your curated content generates, you need a way to continue marketing to your audience after they have followed your link to a third-party website. StartAFire is a new solution that creates a badge on any curated content that you share, so when your audience views an external site you shared, they’ll see your social media badge on that page. This badge can be customized with anything that is relevant to your marketing goals – calls-to-action, social links, web forms, etc. To make it easier to utilize this tool, we have launched a full integration with Oktopost.

Storify

Simply posting third-party content on your social networks isn’t the only way you can share curated content – and it shouldn’t be. Creating blog content, infographics, or other resources that combine other brands’ content is another good way to add value to their content. Storify is a tool that allows you to combine the curated content from multiple different sources into one “story” that you can then post on your blog, embed on your website or even post as a Twitter Card. Instead of a simple list of resources, this creates a media-rich piece of content to engage your audience.

Curata

Curata makes it easy to organize, annotate, and contextualize the content you curate for social media. With content enrichment, this tool enhances the effectiveness of your content with images, quotes, and videos. If the curated content does not include a relevant image, Curata recommends royalty-free images to make your content more engaging.

Measuring and Optimizing

Oktopost analytics and content recommendations

Like any element of your social media strategy, curated content needs to be measured to determine how many clicks, engagement, and leads it is generating. A tool like Oktopost can tell you which content generated the most conversions and revenue for your business – the most important metrics for B2B marketers. Based on this information and keywords users define, the Content Recommendation engine will automatically choose new content and display it in a dashboard that makes it easy to add to your social calendar. Simply choosing content relevant to your industry is no longer enough; your social media team should focus on sharing content that yields the most conversions for your business.

Remaining relevant and engaging on social media requires a steady stream of content. However, with limited budgets and resources, your organization can’t be expected to create all the content you share. By curating content – and doing it effectively – you can leverage the expertise and education of other brands to create an engaging experience for your audience, resulting in even more leads.

What tools do you use to curate content? Are there any that should be added to this list? Let us know in the comments below!