Every brand needs constant content. But it’s time-consuming and expensive to publish your own all the time. This is why curation is now one of the most important aspects of a marketing strategy.
Rather than agonizing over an immaculately researched, SEO-perfect, high-quality piece of original content, why don’t you just share another company’s piece? It’s so easy it almost feels illegal.
Effective curation involves posting diverse forms of content across all platforms. An obvious but crucial one is social media. Though it’s still important to share your focus between websites and other digital marketing platforms (like email newsletters).
By doing this, you’ll ensure great content is at the heart of your brand, not just one aspect of it. To find out more about forming a content strategy, check out our previous blog post.
How apps can help you curate
Once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to perfect your content discovery skills. We know this can be a long and arduous process. So, this is where our handy little list of content curation apps comes into play.
Here at Quuu (being experts on curation and all), we’ve agreed on our favorite apps to find relevant content for your brand. As well as mobile apps, we’ll also be considering browser applications too. So next time you’re struggling and can’t motivate yourself to trawl through endless social media content, blog posts, and videos that might share the same audience as you, you can head straight to this list for a little help.
If you want to learn a bit more about content curation before we get stuck into the best apps, head over to our previous blog post that explains it in a bit more detail.
What can the best content curation apps do for you?
Feel like it’s a bit unnecessary to use a content discovery tool? Think again. It’s not just about putting a bunch of relevant content in one place for you to browse. Content curation software uses advanced algorithms to offer plenty of useful services. Some of these include:
- Automated sharing of trending or new content to your social media accounts
- Tracking of keywords and topics so you can be notified daily about fresh content
- Encourages easy customization to keep curated content on brand (images/URLs/call-to-actions)
- Alerts when relevant news stories are published
We know why you’re here, so we’re going to dive straight into the good stuff.
Our top 10 content curations apps
Drumroll, please…ready to find out Quuu’s top 10 content curation apps? Here we go.
1. Quuu
We think we’re the best content curation app. Who would have thought it? Jokes aside, we want to tell you exactly what we offer and then let you decide.
You may be thinking, how does sharing other people’s content drive traffic back to my website? And it’s a good point. Unlike other content marketing tools, we have now found a way to increase your conversions and website traffic from all the content you share, not just your own.
We make sure that every single piece of content you curate, be it a podcast, tweet, or news source, can have an added customized CTA with our URL shortening tool. This adds a personal touch and directs people back to your site. As you can imagine, this is a big win.
Here are a few of Quuu’s features we’re most proud of:
- Custom CTAs: Add a custom CTA to every piece of content you share to drive traffic back to your personal website.
- Measure the impact: Easily track your click and conversions of the links you share on all your platforms.
- It’s free: Yep, that’s right. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better. With our free plan, you can get up to 500 CTA link clicks and all the basic analytics you’ll need.
2. Triberr
Triberr has a powerful search engine that can provide you with all you need for a successful content marketing strategy. Discovering new articles and sources is super easy, and the ability to customize them means you can ensure they’ll suit your brand’s social feed. Once you’re happy, with a single click, you can share your newfound content across your social media platforms to be admired by bloggers and influencers alike.
Their main concept encourages users to ‘join tribes’. A tribe is a group of content creators that focus on similar topics and share similar interests. You can join these tribes, follow them or create your own. This means you can use their content and leverage their audience to improve your own reach and engagement. It’s a great community that can be super helpful for branching out.
Here are a few top-notch features of Triberr:
- Queuing: Triberr has a brilliant scheduling tool where you can queue your upcoming posts months in advance.
- Constant monitoring: Triberr is constantly monitoring keywords and sources that you are interested in to make sure you are notified of the latest news and trending topics in your industry around the clock.
- Automation: Once you have identified the types of content you are interested in, let Triberr schedule it for you!
Triberr is a great option to go for. They are trusted by thousands of high-profile customers and have plenty of features to get excited about. With the help of the site’s simple and effective functionality, your content strategy and workflow can become super efficient and successful.
3. List.ly
We all love a list. It’s human nature. Quick, easy, informative, and clear; lists can deliver a ton of information in a lovely digestible form. List.ly is super simple to use. Seriously, just download the app and start making lists.
With List.ly, you can follow and share other people’s lists, create your own, and publish them by embedding them on your website. The site also offers a variety of templates when creating lists so it can suit your own content. It’s brilliantly collaborative and invites people to make suggestions and additions, making it a great networking opportunity for small businesses.
A great feature of List.ly is the bookmarks you can create. Add any web page you want to save to your list and embed or share them whenever you need! With a WordPress plugin, it’s super easy to incorporate them into your own blog posts.
It’s a more simple approach to content curation. But it doesn’t make it any less effective. Integrating content creation and curation means your brand can become an authority and thought leader within your industry.
4. Flipboard
Flipboard is an indispensable app for content curation. As well as being accessible on the web, it has a great mobile app for iOS and Android. Here’s how it works:
- Create your Flipboard
Think about your audience. What are they interested in? What’s associated with your brand? What kind of news affects them? Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll know which topics to follow. You can then start a magazine and follow publishers, hashtags, Youtube feeds, and other Flipboard magazines.
- Build your magazines
Want to curate content for multiple subjects? Let’s say you own a healthy-eating-focused restaurant. You’ll want to share recipe ideas with your audience, as well as top tips to keep healthy and maybe even health-related news articles. You can keep these topics separate within individual magazines on your profile. This makes it super easy to navigate and share content quickly. It’ll also keep your followers on their toes. They don’t want endless recipes, so give them something to be excited about!
- Share content
Flipboard makes it super easy to share magazines to your websites and social media. Or, if you’re browsing and come across the perfect article for your followers, you can instantly share the article wherever you like by copying the flip.it link!
Quuu’s top tip: Turn on your notifications to receive news articles in real time, so you can be one of the first to share!
Flipboard is so popular because of the scope of available sources. Its use of RSS feeds means any topic you select comes with a huge wave of content. From news outlets big and small to bloggers, publishers, and so much more. It will increase your business’s knowledge of its industry exponentially whilst keeping your audience engaged at the same time.
Alongside sharing your magazine and articles on your socials, your company can also build a following on Flipboard itself. You’re bound to attract an audience with over 100 million monthly active users!
5. Scoop.it
We love the focus on team collaboration on Scoop.it. By creating an online journal, only visible to your team members, you can agree on content collectively before actively sharing it. This works perfectly to ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to your brand’s marketing strategy.
Scoop.it also makes it super easy to aggregate curated content across multiple WordPress blogs. So if your marketing platform uses WordPress, you’re in for a treat!
It has all the features of successful content curation apps but with some extra little touches (hence why it’s in our top 10). Templated newsletters make email marketing a breeze. Automated social media posts mean you can switch off and relax. And with over 8 million curators, you know you can trust it.
6. Pocket
Pocket markets their app as “your own private corner of the web to spend quality time with great articles”. We know how annoying it is when you come across a great article but you haven’t got the focus or time to delve in straight away. Pocket makes it super simple to save these nuggets of gold for you to properly peruse in your spare time.
It works a little differently from the apps previously mentioned. Rather than specifically browsing content related to your business, it works more like a storage app. This means you can curate content directly from the sources. For example, you’re reading the news, and you fancy saving an article that your audience might like for a later date. Easy. Save it into your pocket. If you’re using a phone, the app works great. If you’re on a laptop or computer, just save the article to your personal Pocket library with one click.
This is a good app to have alongside another content curation tool. It’s useful to be shown an organic array of content rather than content chosen specifically for your brand. It means you can be exposed to diverse content more naturally. You’ll avoid being repetitive on your social media channels and this is the key to keeping an engaged audience!
7. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo isn’t just great at finding content to curate; it is incredibly helpful at generating content ideas. We all know the feeling when you’ve been curating content for a long time. It all gets a bit samey. You can get stuck in a rut, lose motivation or simply run out of ideas.
BuzzSumo’s Content Ideas Generator collects a huge amount of data from across its own site and others to bring you relevant headlines, keywords, questions, topics, and more. This means you’ll never run out of ideas. You’ll be living the content curator’s dream.
And BuzzSumo’s awesome features don’t stop there. They have a simple four-step plan to help you find the right influencers to work with on your social media marketing. Starting with their Content Analyzer, you can search for a topic that relates to your audience. From here, check out the most-shared pieces of content and then the top sharers. You’ll be able to access a list of the top influencers in your area. Share their content with your audience, and expect an increase in engagement straight away!
While you will have access to plenty of content to read and share, BuzzSumo focuses more on providing content sources to generate ideas and creativity. Why not try their 30-day free trial?
8. ContentGems
ContentGems uses various tools to ensure content curation and sharing are simple and effective. By using RSS feeds and keyword and social signal filters, ContentGems ensures only high-quality content can be discovered.
The app focuses on the ability to plug the articles you find into multiple social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. This means you don’t need to spend hours creating and formatting separate posts for separate platforms. With just a few clicks on ContentGems, you’re sorted!
The web app and the mobile app have a great user interface and a clean, easy-to-read content discovery page. After you’ve selected the topics you’re interested in, you can use ContentGems’ filters and keywords to refine the articles suggested. From here, get sharing!
9. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of those content marketing apps that just does it all. As well as helping you find content, it can also act as your social media management app. It has some great analytics tools that can keep an eye on your posts’ performance and help you manage incoming messages from your followers. Alongside this, Hootsuite makes the planning, scheduling, and sharing aspects of content curation a piece of cake.
Hootsuite differs from more conventional content curation apps. Rather than having a single feed or dashboard full of relevant content for you to use, it focuses on helping you learn more about successful content curation. Its vast resource library is full of super helpful insights and endless research that’ll turn you into a content curating genius. And that’s the aim, right?
As well as this, Hootsuite Streams means you can engage and save content specific to your brand. As Hootsuite says, “literally nothing on this planet is easier than that”.
10. UpContent
UpContent wants its users to “build trust and deepen relationships with curated content.” And their app helps you do just that. Their technology analyzes millions of articles every month to make sure you never run dry of top-quality content.
UpContent have integrated their site with many of the content curation apps we’ve already mentioned. This means that a lot of the features we love in other apps can also be accessed with UpContent. It’s sort of a one-stop shop.
Features of UpContent we love:
- Customize content: Add call-to-actions that will engage your audience to drive traffic back to your website.
- Query builder: Create a topic with their Query Builder to discover the most relevant content for your industry.
- Reviewer access: Assign permissions to team members based on their role and include reviewer access for clients or supervisors to get the all-clear before sharing.
Conclusion
We think these are the best content curation tools. Many of them are free to use, and those that require a subscription are usually well worth it. Once you begin using these apps, you’ll never go back. Instead, you can sit back and watch your engagement and following skyrocket.
Want to keep learning about content curation? Lucky for you, we dedicate a whole section of our blog to it. Check it out!
There’s no excuse for poor content anymore. Use this blog post as inspiration and get excited! Start downloading the apps and enter a beautiful world of interesting content.
Have you tried out these apps before? Or maybe have an app you rely on that we haven’t mentioned? Let us know in the comments!
