Content curation is a highly effective inbound marketing strategy and because of this there has been a rise of content curation tools and platforms. So we did what we typically do, we tried to get a good handle on all the options that exist in the market. What follows is our best collection of tools that allow you to easily curate content.
If we missed any tools please leave a comment down below and we will add it to the list.
A quick note about our Ultimate Lists… due to our highly popular list The Ultimate List of Real Time Search and Trending Websites we thought we would do something similar here. Most of all of these platforms we’ve tested, we own or we use. With some we simply give a quick overview but many we add our own thoughts and observations.
First up, we have a completely over the top shameless plug. We’ve created what we consider one of the best content curation platform on the market, it’s called:
Curation Suite
A new entry is Curation Suite™ is a complete content curation platform for WordPress that works with any theme or plugin you have.
This system has quite a bit of awesome curation features and solves the 3 biggest challenges you face as a content curator — finding content, citing content, and promoting content.
New Update! Curation Suite just added a awesome new content discovery/social engagement component called the Listening Engine. This is one of the single best content discovery tools you can find and click here to see it in action.
This addon is like having a team of full time expert content assistants searching the web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week looking for prime content for you to curate.
The base Curation Suite is powerful just by itself. You can easily find content to curate by searching Google News, Google Blogs, Yahoo!, Bing, Slideshare, and Youtube. It also has curation shortcuts where you can curate on the fly or save a link for curation later.
Using this tool to cite content with this tool couldn’t be easier. It’s all visual and allows you to build both single source curations but you can also create multi-source curations round up posts. For instance, here’s a tutorial on How to Use BuzzSumo to Create a Weekly RoundUp.
This platform also allows you to curate anything from text, images, videos and social updates. It also has a built in visual editor and link saving tool. Curation Suite is built to do both short form (single source) and long form curation (multiple source).
With each curated piece of content you pull you’ll get quick summarization you can use as your cited text, also meta text, and suggested tags. You also have a curation by curation flexibility on how you want your content to look. Using the insert to post action buttons you can choose image alignment, with a headline or without, or even wrap your entire cited text within a block quote.
If you are looking for a content curation solution for WordPress then Curation Suite should be on the top of that list.
Curation Traffic WordPress System
Curation Traffic is a WordPress based content curation system. The Curation Traffic system is made up of the Curation Traffic Themes, the Curation Traffic Plugin, and the Curation Mastery Training.
Curating content from around the web is push button simple with our custom built bookmarklet CurateThis. CurateThis also integrates with HootSuite, Pinterest, Buffer, Bit.ly, and other popular social sharing websites allowing to easily engage and share with your curated content.
The Curation Traffic Plugin allows you to easily add content curation to any existing blog or website. It comes with all the power of CurateThis and as a bonus includes the Ultimate Call to Action, a plugin that is designed to increase your conversions by allowing you to create niched focused calls to actions.
With the Curation Traffic Themes your search is over for the perfect content curation theme. Each theme has been designed to showcase your content but most importantly it’s been designed to convert. You can see these themes in action by visiting Marketing News, Curating Content, All About Content Marketing, and the Best of the Web.
We could go on for pages but we’ll end our shameless plug here. If you want to learn more visit CurationTraffic.com, so let’s get going with the rest of the list.
Storify.com
Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media. This platform allows more of a long form social curation. Some of the most popular events of the last few years have been curated on storify. They also have various sections such business, design, technology. The platform also really leads the way in providing an easy way to curate content.
In addition, it has a Storify WordPress plugin (although the way it’s implemented can sometimes break some themes).
Paper.li
Start an online newspaper today. Paper.li is a content curation service. It enables people to publish newspapers based on topics they like and treat their readers to fresh news, daily.
Here’s what they say… we believe that people (and not machines) are the ones qualified to curate the content that matters most. We also think that these same people can greatly help their own communities to find their way through this “massive content world” we live in.
They also have a pro version where you can add your own logo/branding, remove ads, plus a few more features.
List.Ly
What if you wanted to create a list and you wanted that list to be social, visual, and easy to set up? How would you do that? That’s where list.ly comes into frame. It’s good looking self pops in and allows you to easily create lists of anything. People can then vote up or down on, add items, and even embed a list into their own site.
Here’s a few lists we’ve created:
Top Marketing Books
Top Storytelling Books
Top Sales Books
Top Books That Could Change Your Life
Top Business and Entrepreneurial Podcasts
Best History Books
If you need to create a list of something (anything) this is place to go. The co-founder @NickKellet also shared a pretty sweet implementation of “the story of Listly”, or as he also mentioned create a stylized list of all your guest posts. List.ly also has a WordPress plugin allowing you the easy ability to embed lists within your own site.
Kuratur
So this is how a Klingon would spell Curator, and just like the famous warlike race I think there’s a battle happening. It’s Kuratur on one side of the solar system and Paper.li on the other. Kuratur has a few standout features that sets it slightly apart. Namely you have various themes to create a magazine. From there you can drag various blocks of content. Content such as Twitter mentions, hashtags, keywords, Facebook pages and keywords, RSS feeds, and a few more interesting additions. If you like Paper.li and looking for something that maybe has a few different options or a different take on the magazine style curation then check this out. Definitely one to watch.
Zemanta
Zemanta adds a sidebar in your WordPress admin. It then pulls in related articles, images, text links, and tag suggestions. The tool is a hit and miss and will depend on your market and content subject matter. It’s still worth a try but it works best as an addition to your own unique content.
They also have expanded a bit and added some community functionality When you sign up you can add your blog ( and the promise there is they will help share your content as additional sources).
Bundlr.com
With Bundlr you can select the most relevant content about your favorite topics, be it photos, videos, tweets, presentations or articles. With Bundlr you can create bundles with any kind of content: articles, photos, videos, tweets, quotes and links. Real-time breaking news from your sources, event wrap ups with a collection of online feedback, a selection of the most relevant content on your area of expertise.
TumbleCloud
Tumblecloud is a place for collaborative digital storytelling, where users can easily arrange, display, co-create, share and manipulate multimedia content. You set up what are cloud pages (get it tumbleCloud) around a subject of your choice. You then can pull in media such as images, text, and video.
PearlTrees
Pearltrees is your digital library. It lets you collect, organize and share everything you like.
It is a library of your digital life where you can collect web pages, photos and notes about the things you like. Then you can organize them as you please and keep them at hand. For example, if you like movies you could organize a pearltree about « cinema » to make it easy to relocate your favorite finds in your library with just a few clicks.
In addition, it’s social: you can discover millions of pearls organized by other people that share your passions. It’s ideal for enriching your library on any topic you care about.
Pinterest
Okay we probably don’t need to write much about this one but here it is…
Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.
Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.
20+ Examples of Content Curation You Can Publish Right Now
Click Here to Download
Juxtapost
Juxtapost is here to help you remember all the amazing things you see while you browse the web. From planning a wedding, to furnishing a room, there is no end to the number of things people use the web for. However with all its infinite options, managing what you find has become a massive undertaking. For years, web users have relied on a browser’s bookmark tool to save what they find, however this has become far too ineffective when attempting to organize more than a few dozen pages. That’s where Juxtapost steps in. Its sole ambition is to provide members with easy-to-use tools to “bookmark” the photos they find into categorized postboards (collection of posts) that they can easily curate, even if their collection spirals to hundreds of websites.
Eqentia
Eqentia is a new generation of web content publishing, distribution and engagement platform featuring advanced curation, real-time aggregation, text-mining, personalization, semantic extraction and social media integration capabilities.The Eqentia platform can be branded across personal, departmental and organizational boundaries with solutions for competitive intelligence, knowledge tracking, content monitoring, thought leadership, custom content, hyper-local news, content marketing and social newsrooms. Eqentia users benefit from time savings, leads generation, SEO, engaged customers and productive employees.
GageIn Publisher
Use News Portals to easily curate content relevant to your internal and external audience. Create different boards, called Portals, and share them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Chatter, Yammer, and other social networks.
XYDO
XYDO tracks the social actions of over 3 million online tastemakers to match you with content that your audience will love and share. No other application is more fully integrated with the major content marketing platforms, social networks, and email service providers. XYDO’s powerful curation tool is the linchpin to any successful content marketing strategy.
HeadSlinger
HeadSlinger is a new way to read and discover news. On your home page, you’ll find all of your favorite sources, as well as article suggestions made by your friends.
Spundge
Spundge helps you connect with the best content creators on the web. Collaboratively curate the web and create relevant, influential content. Publish and track your content via Spundge’s smart social containers.
The Tweeted Times
The Tweeted Times is a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account. This one barely made the cut because in the end all it really does is aggregate tweets. That’s not to say we don’t like this system, it’s one we use quite a bit but it’s not quite a full curation platform.
Addict-o-matic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.
ClipZine
I don’t quite know what to make of ClipZine. The CLIPZINE is a content curation platform that is able to create a Reusable Sharable Portable Stylish zine page like beautiful magazine-style. You can share and reuse the zine in various ways and media such as URL, JPEG, PDF, download and email the media, and share, submit, embed it to a number of sites, etc.
It’s actually kind of an interesting concept. I didn’t spend tons of time diving into this platform but the ability to take what you’ve created and embed in multiple places is something desirable. The challenge with this platform is I’m not sure how I’d monetize it. It’s still worth looking at.
Scoop.it
Free and paid version. The layout is similar to a magazine layout. Curating content is easy with their bookmarklet, they also have a community built right in. Scoop.it is one of few platforms we still use these days. This is a system we use quite a bit. We curate stuff on new media and Scott curates stuff on history and All Out Massive Action. It’s free to use and you can upgrade to get some additional features such as your own domain and branding.
NewsPin
You choose from your topics, they scan articles, and you can then post to Twitter and Facebook. They have a tagline “become a social media rockstar”, which we are kind of unsure of what that means. Look this list isn’t called ultimate because we’ve trim down the list, it’s called ultimate because it includes all the platforms we could find (and we update it often).
Socl
Socl — pronounced social — lets you create, collect and share stuff you love. From rich visual collages to short animated media and memes, express yourself through posts that take seconds to create, collect and share on Socl, as well as Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter.
Socl offers a suite of simple and fun post Creation Experiences that make it easy to express and share your ideas with people worldwide. These Creation Experiences include: collage, video party, picotale, blink (only for windows devices).
LiveBinders
Your 3 ring binder for the web—it gives you the ability to drop web pages, videos, pdf’s, and images into a binder. You can then share these binders with the world. From what we could figure out it seems like this platform is being used by quite a few educators (if you click on the featured binders you’ll see what we mean). We like the concept here though and it’s easy to use– something every curation platform should be.
WP-Drudge
WP-Drudge is a Drudge Report style (no affiliation) WordPress website template that makes it easy to post external articles, your own blog posts, and links to other sites. Add images, display featured content, and insert ads easily. With many different configuration options, you can make your website look just how you want. Add colors, change fonts, and choose the layout that works for your project.
CurationSoft.com
Discover, review, and curate content from Google Blog Search, YouTube, Twitter, Google News, Flickr and any RSS Feed you want. We are pretty familiar with CurationSoft having used it quite a bit. It’s best described as a stand alone program that allows you to connect to multiple WordPress blogs. It has a discovery engine built right in but we’ve seldom found it to be super helpful. We are a little biased though because we feel you should be finding unique sources and when everybody has access to the same search results you seldom achieve that goal.
Kippt
This was recommended as an addition in the comments down below. After poking around a bit it looks promising. It has a feel of a new version of email with a little bit of Twitter added on top. You can follow people, you can discover new topics, but it also has some good curation features built right in. You have access to a feed of the people you follow, an inbox, in addition to a read it later. There’s also an extension you can install in your browser to easily save, share, and archive any page. You can also set up syncing to various services such as Twitter, GitHub, Pocket, Readability, Buffer, plus a few more. So if Diigo, Twitter, and Evernote had a baby I think it would look a little like Kippt.
Liiist
Okay, well liiist has some pretty interesting features. It’s basically a way to create lists, such as movies you want to see, want lists, food lists, just about anything you can put in a list. First, I like the way the lists look, they are highly visual and when you open an item you can easily cycle back and forward. It also has voting and commenting per item built right in. Next, the only thing that was a little confusing is once you sign up there’s not a ton to do except create your own list, while they have some stuff going for them the features and community has to grow a bit to catch up with list.ly who we mention above. Still worth checking out if your looking for a list curation tool.
Publicate
You’re already curating content by saving to Pocket, subscribing via RSS on Feed.ly, or sharing on Slack. Publicate connects with these tools (and more), to pull content curated by your entire team into one centralized place. Creating beautiful email newsletters, roundup blog posts, branded social shares, and other great content marketing assets takes seconds in Publicate with drag-and-drop templates. No coding or extra design needed. Publicate actually makes this maxim possible. Create new content assets in minutes, then seamlessly share on social media, your email list, or any webpage via HTML embed.
TagBoard
TagBoard Says they are the cross-network hashtag-powered social hub. Tagboards are live collections of social media posted with hashtags, arranged in a dynamic, visual mosaic. You can do more than just view social posts on a tagboard, you can engage with them — with native interactions built-in. The Tagboard platform is centralized but is designed for multiple displays for the same tagboard, whether mobile or projected, tagboard.com or yourdomain.com. As of the time of this writing TagBoard does allow a free basic version for you try.
EverPost
EverPost filters and curates the best content for you to share, everyday. So first thing’s first: they filter your content. And that means you get the best content, that’s most relevant to your audience, to share everyday. As well as sharing the best content out there, EverPost also helps you out with suggested gamified posts and quotation posts, to keep your social channels interactive. Share your posts at the best time for your audience, across all your social channels, including: Facebook fan pages, Twitter profiles, LinkedIn profile and company pages. The EverPost Scheduler lets you auto-schedule your posts (we choose the optimal times to post your content). Or you can schedule a specific day and time.
Entreprise Level Curation Tools
The following tools are what we would classify as enterprise level. Sure some of the tools above you will see large organizations us but the tools listed below seem to really focused on larger cost, footprint, and different feature sets that an enterprise level user would expect.
Curata
Curata enables you to easily find, organize and share content on specific topic to help you save time in managing your content flow for your organization. The Curata team are true thought leaders in content curation and if you want a reliable enterprise solution I would start here.
PublishThis
The PublishThis Content Curation Platform enables businesses to take advantage of curated content to engage their customers, automate content marketing, improve competitive intelligence and reduce digital publishing costs.
MassRelevance
We believe that social experiences should be designed to engage your audience with visually compelling displays of the most relevant social media content. These experiences drive interactivity, loyalty, and lead to real business results for brand, media, and entertainment companies. We’ve created a powerful social engagement platform which supports advanced sourcing, aggregation, curation, moderation, display, participation, and integration capabilities around social content.
Darwin EcoSystem
Weeding out irrelevant results and discovering significant information has become a critical challenge for business. The Darwin Awareness Engine can help accomplish this for a wide range of information specialists. This is one of the few systems on this list we haven’t used, still worth checking out if your in the market for a enterprise level solution.
BagTheWeb
BagTheWeb helps users curate Web content. For any topic, you can create a “bag” to collect, publish, and share any content from the Web.
Beyond most curation tools’ capability, BagTheWeb enables users to build networks of bags. This way bags can be linked together to provide rich and complete information about any topic.
Storination
To create in less than a minute a beautiful Storyboard with awesome content curated by you and others. Storination lets you create online communities called a Nation, where people share social stories on the same topic. After opening your Nation, you organize your Storyboard, a virtual space where anybody can contribute by adding his own Storify story.
Secondary Content Platforms
These are platforms that we would consider straying slightly from the curation mold but they are worth mentioning.
SurfMark
Surfmark allows you to save all the effort you put in seeking knowledge from the Web, and turn it into something that you can keep for ever. When you combine these efforts with those of millions of other people, the impact can be so profound that it may just change the way we look at the Web.
FlashIssue
Email newsletter curation. FlashIssue is designed for people who want to create marketing content quicker and easier. It’s based on the premise that you shouldn’t need a double Phd in HTML Formatting to get a newsletter out the door. The goal of the platform is to allow you to discover, organize and package content (aka curation) for online marketing in an insanely easy way. We hope you agree.
ZooTool
Zootool is about collecting, organizing and sharing your favorite images, videos, documents and links from all over the internet. More of a bookmarking tool but it made the cut because of the cool name.
MySyndicaat.com
mySyndicaat is a news mastering tool that allows you to retrieve, filter, mix and monitor content from remote content sources available on the web. Collected content is cached by mySyndicaat and can be retrieved later on either by using mySyndicaat content viewer, or by subscribing to is using any RSS 2.0-compliant RSS aggregator.
Once you have registered to use the service, you start by creating a feedbot. FeedBots (i.e., feed-robots) are the means by which you specify the sources that you want to monitor. In most instances, they are RSS- or Atom-compliant feeds. Alternatively, they can be publicly available search engines that return their search results as RSS feeds.
Utopic
Save any web page quickly with browser extensions. Your links are auto-tagged by keywords to find them fast later. Discover not just content, but also interesting people – those similar to you.
Keemix
Keemix allows you to gather loved content from the web, mix it into your own custom-designed pages, and share it to inspire your friends and colleagues.
Curation Reading Platforms
The platforms that follow are more built for reading and consuming content. They work great for setting up what are called listening posts and a curator is only as good as the content they curate. This is something you will learn in our Curation Mastery Training.
Feedly
We use Feed.ly every single day. When you have over 900+ feeds in Google reader pulling them into feed.ly makes all the difference. Feedly allows you to easily browse, read and share your favorite sites. The layout is awesome and if you’ve broken down your feeds into folders you can easily get an overview of any niche market.
Pulse
Pulse is an elegant news reading application for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. It incorporates colorful panning story bars and fills them with content from your favorite sources. Pulse redefines news, giving you the opportunity to experience the news you desire from traditional sources, your favorite blogs and social networks – all in one beautiful interface.
Pocket (formerly Read it Later)
Okay, pocket might seem like this tool where all you do is run around with your mobile phone and tablet clicking on things you want to read later… but it’s not. It’s so much more if you dive in a little. It’s really your central place to pull in content from all your devices. With some tagging and connections to over 300 web and other platforms you can setup a pretty nice curation push station. We weren’t sure where to classify Pocket but ultimately it’s primary function is still consumption so it’s regulated down here.
Google Currents
Favorite publications, tuned for your tablet and smartphone. This app looks good on the Nexus 7 and does a good job of helping you discover new content and sites.
Zite
We all want to be in touch with the “Zeitgeist” — the spirit of our times. We want to know the current events, important ideas and smart opinions that are circulating in our world-what’s happening and what’s interesting. And we want to be challenged with experiences that are new and unexpected.
With so much information available online today, it’s increasingly difficult and time-consuming to find the content we want. That’s where Zite comes in. Zite evaluates millions of new stories every day, looking at the type of article, its key attributes and how it is shared across the web. Zite uses this information to match stories to your personal interests and then delivers them automatically to your iPad or iPhone.
YourVersion
The best way to discover new content that’s relevant to you. YourVersion is the best way to discover the latest stories on the topics you care about, all in one place.
Link.ly
We built lynkly because we want to connect everyone together to find the most talked about stories in the world – before they become popular. We were inspired by Nicholas Christakis’ TED talk about how social networks can predict epidemics. In a similar fashion, we predict the popularity of stories that are being shared around the world by using social networks. Help us achieve that goal by connecting your Facebook and Twitter feeds with lynkly!
20+ Examples of Content Curation You Can Publish Right Now
Click Here to Download
iFlow
iFlow is all about delivering the content that matters to you right now, rather than just following the crowd. At the heart of iFlow are topic-based streams called flows that allow you to stay connected with the topics you care about on an ongoing basis. iFlow gives you the ability to automatically and manually aggregate content from a variety of sources, with advanced features to filter and forward content from one flow to another in real-time as it happens.
PostPost
They’ve changed a few times (when I first learned of PostPost they were doing Facebook curation) but the latest iteration is toplines from people you follow on Twitter. Basically a Twitter aggregation and search engine. Haven’t used it much lately but it’s worth checking out to see if it’s something you will like.
News.ME
Your top stories from Facebook and Twitter delivered to your inbox. They have an iPhone app, an iPad app, and a daily email that deliver the best stories shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook.
Trap!t
Trapit works for you 24/7, capturing what you want, serving it up fresh and spam-free all day long.
Postano
Aggregate, Integrate and Display Social Media Content Anywhere. Social media operates at lightning speed, with thousands of post and tweets going live every second. It’s no wonder that brands want to harness its marketing power.
Contentle
Contentle – is your online notepad where you can place your favorite image/video/bookmark/text, organize, annotate and then share it with whomever you want..
You can “contentle” (i.e. save and organize): Images, Video, Text, Bookmark.
Saved fragments can be annotated with a short description or notes.
You can create Collections of fragments so you can organize multiple fragments in folders. While you are saving the fragments you can choose the Collection it belongs to.
Segmen.to
Segmen.to works for you by searching contents everywhere: news feeds, newspapers websites, and many other channels. Segmen.to accesses thousands of online newspapers, your rss feeds, social medias, reading applications and web searches.
Powerful filters allow you to get content matching your keywords.
Our unique predictive analytics engine automatically computes the article’s relevance based on your latest articles choices. Ppredictive analytics engine helps you to spot the most shared and relevant articles, the one with the highest authority and the most relevant for your audience.
Other Mentions
http://www.kweeper.com/
http://pinboard.in/ – Social Bookmarking for Introverts. Pinboard is a fast, no-nonsense bookmarking site.
http://www.hitpad.com/ (iPad app)
http://www.flud.it/ – looks to bring together companies and teams around social and industry intelligence (in private beta)
https://wavii.com/ – Instant news feeds for any topic. Lots going on. Keep up with everything you like, love, and love to hat
http://inagist.com/ – individual channels of content ranked by social signals.
http://bonzobox.com/ – When you bookmark a website with BonzoBox you get to decide where to put it on your BonzoBox homepage. Then we take a picture of the website and keep the picture updated for you.
MyCurator – a wordpress plugin that’s a little rough around the edges but has promise.
https://www.taptu.com/ – DJ Your News : Taptu provides instant access to all your interests in one beautiful little app.
http://historio.us/ – Finally, bookmarking you can love historious saves you time by helping you find webpages you saw before. Bookmark sites with a single click, then find them again by searching for any word in the content of the page!
http://storyful.com/ – Storyful is a news gathering platform developed and powered by journalists for journalists.
http://polystory.com – Curate topics with friends… most of the stories were in a language that I wasn’t sure what it was, but it has a pinterest like layout and some good social features built in.
Additions and Updates
November 2nd, added Cotentle and Segmen.to, Removed Prismatic (no longer offers curation tool).
November 14th, added Pocket to the curation reading section
November 16th, added List.ly – how did we miss that great service?
November 19th, added Kippt, Liiist, and Kuratur (that’s how a Klingon would spell “curator”).
November 20th added Polystory to the bottom
November 16th, removed Curation Station… because “curation station is no longer in operation, we have terminated service”
February 20th, Added TagBoard and EverPost
February 25th, removed Snip.it: We are excited to share some big news: Snip.it has been acquired by Yahoo! As of today, we will no longer support snipping.
April 19th, Thanks to a great comment morethan2parties we cleaned up the list quite a bit. Removed Dashter (no longer available), .Collected, Qrait, Faveous, ClpBoard, Nextmags, Retickr, Intigi, and updated link for XYDO.
June 12th, removed CurateExpress as the site is no longer active.
July 21st, Added Publicate