Content curation is a critical part of your content ecosystem. Audiences today are always craving fresh, relevant and industry-specific quality content. Below are five content curation tools that can help you surface high-quality content that will resonate with your audiences and — the ultimate aim — position your website as a go-to source within online communities.
#1 Flipboard – Your “Digital Magazine” at Your Fingertips
This personalized news reading application, coined a social magazine, aggregates high-quality content from a variety of popular social networks and publishers based on user interest.
Channeling the traditional glossy magazine-style pages, users easily “flip” pages with simple swipes on Android and iOS device touch screens.
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Flipboard is a customizable content curator. In addition to reading content pertaining to your niche interest, you can also leverage the magazine-creation feature to collect content from dozens of different publications, blogs, websites and multiple social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram, etc.
Flipboard’s curation and publishing features extend beyond individual users to corporations, advertisers and brands. They turn Flipboard into a content powerhouse by aggregating and distributing the most brand- or industry- relevant content. Flipboard monetizes its content by building the e-commerce feature into the app, so users can make purchases directly within an article or ad.
Flipboard is effective in improving SEO, as it employs an algorithm to surface the most specific content based on the frequency of sharing and other metrics. As this tool enables users to create their own topic-specific magazines, it automatically populates the most searched keywords and topics. (Read my previous blog post for more information: Flipboard: The Next Content Marketing Strategy for more insights.)
#2 Feedly – A Great RSS Feed Reader Replacement for Google Reader
With the demise of the popular RSS aggregator Google Reader earlier this month, Feedly is undoubtedly the top alternative, as it enables the import of RSS feed from Google Reader 
or from an OPML exported file. Feedly powers a seamless user experience by offering several different layout choices based on users’ reading preferences — from the classic list format to a neatly arranged magazine type feed or a Pinterest-style presentation. Keyboard shortcuts are available for fast and easy reading and built-in social sharing functionality.
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What differentiates this tool from others is that it’s not only available for iOS and Android interfaces, but also works slickly as a browser extension on Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
With the integration of social sharing service Buffer, Feedly is poised to be another efficient content sharing tool for social community managers to schedule posts across various social networks at predefined times to maximize content exposure.
#3 Zite – A Smart, Customizable Magazine
Zite, a personalized magazine, has a huge library of articles covering numerous topics, and they have organized their content based on quality and frequency.
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Different from other content curation tools, Zite is powered by a smart discovery engine that can sift through millions of articles daily and deliver stories that pertain to your personal interests based on the articles you “like” and the topics you follow within the app. Similar to LinkedIn Today, the more relevant articles are featured in the “Your Top Stories” section.
#4 Scoop.it – A Topic-Focused Curation Tool
Scoop.it, available on both mobile and Web, allows users to discover niche content relevant to a given topic from an unrestricted number of sources, including but not limited to niche publications, RSS feeds, blogs and social networks.
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Scoop.it’s key uniqueness is that it enables one to scope out collections curated by others who have similar interests to your own, allowing you to quickly find the most relevant content.
Like the LinkedIn Thought Leadership program, you can also follow industry-specific leaders or subject-matter experts on Scoop.it, which gives you access to the insightful content they curate.
You can also create a “digital magazine” on Scoop.it to curate everything relevant to your predefined topic and then share it with your networks. Your curated content can be organized by social channel and content type.
#5 Storify – A Powerful Social Content Curation Platform
When it comes to social sharing, Storify tops the charts. It is a social storytelling curation platform upon which users can aggregate quotes, posts, images and videos from a variety of social networks including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and Instagram.
A number of reputable news media outlets, such as ABC News, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, have jumped on the Storify wagon and used it to curate and distribute informative content. Brands like General Electric, Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard are using this platform to turn social posts into compelling stories.
Editor’s Insights:
In the age of being bombarded by information on various social channels, Storify is an effective content curation tool to cut the social noise and pull relevant conversations together into a cohesive “story.”
One of its most compelling features: it allows you to leverage the social influence of the people involved in your story and extend conversation reach with their social networks.
This tool is especially helpful for bloggers and company thought leaders who want to virally promote their blog posts. Essentially, they can incorporate relevant tweets or videos into a post, with all links preserved, to better illustrate the story. The stories can be embedded in blogs and websites using an embed code.
Overall, as part the three C’s of content marketing strategy — Creation, Contribution and Curation — content curation plays an essential role in your content strategy. To position your brand’s website as a content powerhouse and industry-specific thought leader, you need to curate and distribute content beyond your brand’s social networks. Using the above tools will smooth your content discovery journey. Which one do you prefer? Or do you have other tools to recommend? Let’s start the conversation below.