Which apps are best for content curation? Content curation is time consuming and difficult. However as many an expert will tell you it is vital in a digital marketing world. Being able to keep ahead of your market on the go is essential these days so we have selected 4 apps that give you a few short cuts and make content curation easier.
These apps are
- Cloud based
- Available on all platforms
- Integrated
If you like the sound of any of them you can click on the relevant platform in the description which will take you directly to the install page. (You’re welcome)
Feedly
(Originally called Feeddo)
App availability: iOS | Android | Web
Price: Free (upgrade to pro available)
Extensions: n/a
Feedly is the best friend of content curation. If you want to stay ahead of any particular field, you need to know the most up to date and relevant news. Feedly allows you to search for any given topic and will link you to the best blogs and media publishers in that area. Not only that you can get Google alerts on exact search terms via Feedly. This allows you to get the most fresh info on any topic in near real time from worldwide sources.
Organize your favorite blogs, news sites, podcasts and Youtube channels and access them all in one place.
(Originally called Read It Later)
App availability: iOS | Android | Web
Price: Free | $4.99 month premium
Extensions: Google Chrome
Pocket is essentially an offline reader on steroids. The original concept for Pocket was for it to be like Tivo for web content.
Pocket is integrated into over 300 apps and counting. If you find an article you like, or want to read a little later you simply save the link into pocket. Pocket then saves the content of the link offline so you can read at any point. This in itself isn’t revolutionary as these kinds of reader services have been around for a while. However for someone who blogs this service is invaluable.
If you are collecting several sources for a potential future blog, Pocket is the app to use. You can tag all saved articles so you can quickly and easily search and find that you are looking for at a later date.
Pocket is actually integrated with over 500 apps so even if you use other apps for similar purposes on this list then pocket seems to be a bit of a no brainer. 9 million users and over240 million saves can’t be wrong, right?
IFTTT
(Pronounced “ift” as in “gift”)
App availability: iOS | Android | Web
Price: Free
Extensions: n/a
I like to describe IFTTT as internet glue. It is an app connector with potentially endless possibilities. IFTTT works on a recipe basis, you create an action based on a trigger. If X happens then Y should also happen. Some example Triggers are “I’m tagged in a photo on Facebook” or “I check in on Foursquare”. The “that” part of a Recipe is called an Action. Some example Actions are “send me a text message” or “create a status message on Facebook” (source: Wikipedia) IFTTT currently works on 100 channels and counting, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
IFTTT can increase your productivity through automation, when you use the app you can see the most popular recipes, and easily use them, or you can create your own. It has recently launched for Andriod and is the one app of the 4 mentioned that has the most exciting future as more services join and recipes are created.
Buffer
(Pronounced “awesome”)
App availability: iOS | Android | Web
Price: Free (upgrade to Awesome Plan available $10 per month)
Extensions: Google Chrome
Buffer is an lightweight but extremely powerful social media channel management tool. Free to use, you can easily schedule content across multiple channels (including Linkedin Business Pages). Buffers’ power comes in the scheduling capability, you don’t need to (although you can if desired) specify times for your content to go out. You set up your preferred timings in your account, this allows you to “fill up your buffer” with amazing content, and they do the rest. Buffer sends out your content at the times specified in your account automatically freeing you up to do other things.
With Buffer you can chose to publish now, to add to buffer or to specify a time, so you have full and flexible scheduling features. You can also use shortened links, however if you wish to track the statistics you need to be on the upgraded Awesome Plan. We highly recommend the upgrade.
How to Use all 4 Together
Now here is the clever bit. If you want these apps to work together they can. By using these apps in a certain way, you can again cut down on time spent on content curation.
Presuming that you have some good search terms set up on Feedly then you can use that as your starting point for this example. As you are clicking through the articles that interest you, you have a simple two question approach to decide what you will do with that content.
- Do you want to share this now? If this something that is relevant to your audience and it is important that you share it immediately then you would share it immediately with Buffer.
- Is this useful to your audience or yourself later? If it is something that is really useful to your audience but you don’t need to share it immediately then you can add it to your Buffer queue to be shared when specified in your account. However you may want to read the article later, possibly it is a longer article that you wish to use as a source in a blog you’re writing, or you the headline seems like it would be a useful article, but you want to give it a thorough read before you share (always recommended). If this is the case then you should add it to your Pocket.
Another way to keep content flowing through your Pocket account is by setting up an IFTTT recipe that allows you to save your favourites on Twitter directly to your Pocket. I find this recipe really powerful as it allows me to whiz through my Twitter stream at busy points of the day and save articles from Tweets that headlines grab me. The good news is it doesn’t matter which platform I favourite something on, the trigger of the favourite causes the action of the save in Pocket.
