These Tools Guarantee You Never Run Out of the Content Your Audience Craves Finding what most engages your followers requires sifting through a torrent to find the best.
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Constantly posting great content is your best bet to beat the social-media algorithms and attain high engagement, but also very challenging and time-consuming. Now, where do we find all this content to share? How do we determine if the audience will like and engage with it?
There are useful content curation tools available that discover popular content for you so you never run out of ideas.
Pocket is a highly recommended app for saving interesting articles to read later, on your own time. This function alone makes Pocket worthy of the download but there is more. Pocket sends you notifications when stories relevant to you are trending. Also, @PocketHits tweets, on average, five trending articles a day.
Related: 4 Indispensable Content-Marketing Resources
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a very powerful content curation software with an amazing formula for calculating how viral is any given piece of content. It ranks the most popular content by displaying lots of engaging statistics that can be separated by popularity on a specific social media platform, specific date and whether it is a video, photos, articles, etc.
BuzzSumo is one of my top sources for great engaging content.
Feedly
Feedly keeps you on top of relevant content by monitoring RSS feeds you follow and searching for hashtags, your choice of topics, and finding new, worthy websites and content.
SlideShare
SlideShare is amazing for both getting discovered as a content marketer and for digging deep into highly visual content -– and we know people love visuals! -– from a lot of influential people and companies.
SlideShare is mostly used to share presentations, infographics and white papers, so you are guaranteed to find highly-engaging, high quality content you can share as a link or embed where appropriate.
Related: 6 Ways to Source Content for Your Website
I love Flipboard for its consistently amazing, timely and relevant content. Download the app to your smartphone and tablet, specify the topics you're interested in. Done!
Flipboard is like your personalized newspaper, bringing only the best fresh content from a variety of major and less-mainstream sources. The articles you especially liked can then be saved into your "magazines," collections of saved articles. The app allows easy sharing on all social media platforms without switching between the apps.
Buffer and Hootsuite
Both Buffer and Hootsuite offer free and paid versions, and both are awesome apps for sharing and scheduling your content. A useful feature of both tools suggesting good, relevant content that most interests you. If you ever run out of interesting content, change keywords and keep scrolling through suggestions.
It then only takes a moment to share it (or schedule for future share based on apps' suggested times to reach the most audience). Both Buffer and Hootsuite also send you an email any time your queue runs out of scheduled content, so it's easy to stay on top of scheduling your social media posts.
Klout
Klout"s primary functions are measuring your social influence and helping you grow your influence in many ways. After you chose your areas of interest, it suggests lots of content and relevant, influential Twitter handles to follow. You stay up-to-date on trending content and learn how to grow your own influence by following best practices of those who have achieved success.
Alltop
Alltop.com aggregates a wealth of interesting articles on a wide variety of topics. Guy Kawasaki, the founder of Alltop, is one of the most famous social media users, who tweets upwards of 50 tweets each day and enjoys a Twitter following of millions of people. Quite impressive, right?
Alltop displays a list of articles from a variety of sources all on one page (this page can look quite overwhelming at first). This is also a great tool to look for inspiration and ideas for your next blog post or social media update.
Related: Increase Your Marketing ROI with Free Content
LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Plus
All three of these platforms have potent "popular" feeds that display highly-engaging posts on any topic imaginable. Search "What's Hot" on Google Plus, "Popular" on Pinterest or Pulse on LinkedIn.
Not only can you re-share that great content on your own pages for your audience to see, it is also a great tool for audience insight. What do people engage with the most? When do they comment most often? What topics provoke thoughts? Which posts gain the most likes and re-shares? You can then follow the format or the content strategy based on the insight you gain from it.
In this day and age, it's not about where to find content – because it's everywhere. The question becomes how to sort and filter through this waterfall of information to find useful and engaging bits that your audience will enjoy.
