Content Curation is a great way to boost the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.

Sharing good content is very important on social media, giving your followers things to engage with that will be interesting, educating or entertaining, alongside more direct efforts to turn them into customers.

You may have plenty of your own content to post, but you may also want to share content from other sources that would be relevant to your audience and give them more reason to be a part of your community. That’s where content curation comes in.

However, it can be very time-consuming to locate the right kind of content for your channels.

There are a number of great tools available online that can help you find and curate content for your niche. There are also those that can be almost fully automated, but you should always exercise caution and try to ensure that what you are sharing is right for your followers.

Here we look at five of the best content curation tools…

Twitter Lists

If you have a Twitter account, then setting up Lists for your niche can be a really simple and effective way to support your content curation efforts.

If you follow lots of people on Twitter, Lists enable you to group and sort other accounts into certain categories or niches so you can easily view only the updates posted on those pages.

When you view your lists, you’ll then see an stream of related posts, allowing you to easily like and share with your own audience.

Feedly

Feedly is an effective way of organising, reading and sharing content from your favourite websites. With a free version offering limited sources and feeds, and an upgrade for around £5 per month, it’s affordable if you don’t need to monitor too many different accounts or topics.

Feedly allows you to organize your favorite blogs, sites, podcasts and Youtube channels and access them all in one place, then easily save articles across devices or share them on Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Pinterest or LinkedIn. Directly or via Buffer, Pocket or Instapaper.

ContentGems

ContentGems says it is a ‘content discovery engine’, scanning hundreds of thousands of articles from the best online sources, presenting a stream of relevant and timely content.

You can either use their database of content sources or add your own via RSS feeds. You can also use keywords, social signals or other filters to get content suggestions.

You can share the content to your social channels, or the ContentGems tool can integrate them with your other social media sharing tools, such as Buffer and Hootsuite, so that you can use the content to fill your update queues and schedule the posts.

Again, there is a very limited free version, and a big step up in cost to the premium ‘business’ plan that they want around £200 a month from you for, so it’s a big decision and one that needs to be worthy for your business.

Dlvr.it

Dlvr.it calls itself an ‘Automated Social Media Manager’, allowing you to spend more time away from your desk. It’s great for you as someone looking after the accounts, but is it great that all this automated content is feed out from your channels directly to your followers?

It can be, if the sources you are using are good quality, relevant, reliable and trust-worthy. If you’re happy with them, then this could be an ideal weapon in your social media arsenal.

Their website says it can help you put your social media on autopilot, allowing you to connect RSS feeds to all your social media profiles. You can automatically share photos, articles and videos across all your social networks with no effort.

Dlvr.it scans your RSS feeds and other trusted content sources for new articles, blogs and photos, posting the latest items to Twitter, Facebook and your other social media pages right on your schedule.

There’s a limited free version, and if you need a more powerful solution, their premium products start from around £8 per month.

Quuu

Another tool that claims to put ‘Content Curation on Autopilot’.

Quuu says it is the number one source for content and the only place where each and every piece has been hand-reviewed in-house.

‍This content curation tool sends content directly to your Buffer or HubSpot schedule. After connecting your social media channels, you can then select from 500 content categories and choose how many times per day suggestions are sent to you. Quuu then lets you manage the content manually, or will even post automatically for you.

The free option limits you to six suggestions per day, for three social platforms, while the pro (£20 per month) or business (£50 per month) plans offer more accounts and platforms.

So, there are five of the best content curation tools we’ve found, but there will of course be many, many more. The important this is that, once you have the right system in place for your platforms, you use it in the right way, mixing content curation with your own messaging and content.

If you need help with your company’s digital marketing, then drop us a line via the form below and we’d love to help you get started and grow your business online.

We Are Border is a digital marketing and social media management agency based on the Essex and Suffolk border near Colchester, aimed at help small companies and large promote their business online.

As we are a small social media company, we can combine our years of experience working in the social media, digital marketing and content industry with a personal approach that many other agencies and social media management companies cannot offer.