November 5, 2014
Sourcing fresh content that genuinely engages and adds value among your community is always a challenge. Making sure you discover content that is not only fresh but also on-trend and totally relevant for curating back to your social following is key to gaining positive engagement over lowering sentiment. Here are several tools and methods you can use to supercharge your content discovery and curate value.
Swayy
A great new web app that plugs into your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, analyses your communities content and word trends and gives you a customisable ‘sea’ of suggested content in a wonderfully graphic format. Users can then pick and choose content to schedule posts out to there connected channels and also customise the key topics terms that determine the content displayed.
Buzzsumo allows you to set up searches according to keywords and brand mentions and displays content by most shared and the most influential Twitter profile who’s sharing it. Yes, its great for identifying influencers, yes, its awesome for showing what’s actually being shared on different channels especially around obscure or niche topics and more than that; it plugs into your Twitter account allowing you to build Twitter lists of influencers and bloggers etc. Premium version also enables you to generate an rss feed of trending content according to specific search terms which you can then plug into your other feeds like buffer, pocket or Feed.ly etc! I know, a little slice of awesome.
Feed.ly
Feed.ly basically replaced what Google feeds was doing with RSS. Basically capturing web content feeds and streaming them into your own customised channels. You can set up your own custom feeds of the content from your most useful websites and blogs, meaning you don’t have to go to each website and collect links and images. The chrome extension also allows you to add to Feed.ly channels as you surf meaning with a couple of clicks you can build a custom channel with relevant content ready for you to pass on or inform your own content planning. Again Feed.ly connects with buffer, Evernote, Twitter etc to allow you to send content onto your plethora of extended channels very easily.
Twitter search feeds and Lists
As obvious as it may sound, I still know that not enough people are using Twitter lists or custom searches to discover relevant content. In particular, search feeds for a couple of keywords have given me some of the best content I have ever found and also gives a good indication of what’s trending, especially when you see the same content posted several different ways by totally unconnected Twitter profiles. Twitter lists on the other hand require a little more attention in building and developing as a habit and can be great for seeing what the hot topics are resonating within certain groups or related lists of profiles.
LinkedIn pulse
A little bit different in being that LinkedIn is a professional channel and Pulse populates your feed based on the pages and the influencers you follow. Meaning users tend to usually get content that has more insight or depth within certain specialities or subject matter. I certainly get more conversational content and posts around data and digital developments that I find not only I can get involved in the conversation but I can contribute and repost for further engagement on other channels. Definitely one of the most valuable channels for content discovery.
We’d love to know if you are using any of these tools and if you have any success or failure stories. We always find tiny gaps in the tech we are using e.g. the LinkedIn group posting scheduler in Swayy doesn’t have a ‘Title’ field (essential for group posting), however we connected with them to let them know. Feeding back like this is usually genuinely appreciated especially from those of us who are using tools like these to their full potential.