A key element to inbound marketing today is becoming an influential voice in your industry. Think bees to honey…with multiple “flavors” of honey.
No longer is producing a superior product or creating a more dominant distribution strategy enough to win…now it is all about trusted relationships and differentiating your voice from others by providing more valuable insights and information to your customers. So one of the biggest challenges in marketing has now become how to efficiently, consistently aggregate and mine information and add an up-to-the-minute, informed perspective around new industry trends, changing consumer needs, competitor moves and product news which might be of interest to your customers.
Developing original content is both expensive and time consuming. What makes more sense is to pick your battle weapons and launch into the fray of excellent content curation – distilling down the important insights which create real value for your customers. Reporters have been using social media to source stories for several years…why shouldn’t you? But with an estimated 3.65 billion indexed pages on the world wide web, how can brand marketeers possibly keep up with the flow of information and data in their brand universe?
Fortunately, there are a number of new tools which make the job of content curation easier, faster and more efficient. Here are a few of my favorites:
IDENTIFYING CONTENT BY TOPIC
GoogleAlerts: Sends email alerts defined by keyword-based topics (free)
Social Mention: Identifies by keyword/brand all indexed content across the social universe (free)
WeFollow: Twitter directory to identify prominent and influential content creators based on their activity and followers in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instragram (not free; subscription based)
Twilert: Similar to Google Alerts for Twitter (low cost)
Topsy: Links, Tweets, Photos, Videos, Experts. It’s all on Topsy (free; pro analytics subscription)
AGGREGATING AND EVALUATING CONTENT
Feedly: The RSS reader which streams news and blog content to an aggregated set of live links by topic
Pocket: (formerly Read It Later) is my favorite way of grabbing articles, blog posts and other content I never have time to get through during the day and “save it for later” in one easy to sift through private portal.
SYNDICATING CONTENT
Hootsuite and Hootlet: Post across accounts, schedule, relax.
Buffer: Preschedule those posts or articles, images, videos.
Need help with your content curation for your brand? Let us help…