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There's no denying that content is king online, but trying to create all that content on your own? It's exhausting and, frankly, boring for your readers and community members. Using content curation tools is a great way to find fresh content to share, build on, and even allow your community to join in on the editorial process with. Here are the six tools I find the most useful and powerful.
Scoop.it - http://www.scoop.it/
Leading the pack is Scoop.it. After creating a topic and inserting some keywords, Scoop.it crawls its suggestion engine for you and suggests relevant content. You can add it to your topic and even post straight to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other services with a few easy clicks. One particularly awesome feature that Scoop.it added recently is the Newsletter function. Depending on your plan you can export your scoops monthly or weekly into a newsletter format, making that process quicker and easier.
RebelMouse - http://rebelmouse.com
RebelMouse takes a slightly different turn, utilizing the networks you're already connected to and pulling content from there into a Front Page for you. Setup only takes a few minutes. You can embed your RebelMouse page on your site (after playing around with customization a bit, of course) or upgrade to use a domain redirect.
Paper.li - http://paper.li
Similarly, Paper.li make a newspaper styled front page out of your Twitter feed or topic keywords that you choose. With social functions, embedding, and scheduled updates, Paper.li can be a perfect Daily Digest of content.
Storify - http://storify.com
A favorite of news organizations, Storify allows you to pull content in from Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, websites, and other services to create a cohesive multimedia story. While it requires more hands-on involvement than something like RebelMouse or Scoop.It, it's a powerful storytelling tool that suits many situations. My current favorite storify: Babymugging; it's a thing (from The Today Show)
List.ly - http://list.ly
If lists are more your thing, you may want to look at List.ly. With List.ly, you can create a list of links related to any topic you want and annotate the list. You can select tags for each list item (allowing for easy sorting), enable other users to add items to your list, and embed lists on your own website.
Pinterest - http://pinterest.com
Pinterest as a curation tool? Thanks to community boards, it can be. Start a board on the topic that you're interested in and invite friends who show interest, as well as names you see pop up in searches for the topic time and time again.
How do you use these curation tools? Are there any you love that I missed? Share your thoughts in the comments.
(Image: Newspapers B&W (5), a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 62693815@N03's photostream)
