Over the last year, content marketing has experienced a meteoric rise as one of the leading social media strategies for companies. As companies develop content marketing plans, choosing the right content curation tool has become an important decision that can have a big impact on the success or failure of a content marketing plan. With the right content curation tools, a company can save a lot of time, money and consistently discover high quality content.
Why Content Curation Tools
Once a basic content marketing strategy has been developed, a content curation tool needs to be selected. Content curation tools make it easier to monitor, aggregate and organize content from a variety of sources. Almost all of them are able to aggregate RSS feeds, Facebook posts, and tweets. Despite the similarities, each content curation tool has unique features tailored to the needs of a specific audience.
This will be the first in a series of articles on content curation tools for content marketing. We will be focusing on two of the most popular content curation solutions, Storify and Storyful, in the beginning of the series. Before we begin, let’s review a few content marketing basics.
What is Content Marketing
Content marketing is the creation, syndication and sharing of content as a marketing strategy to engage current and potential customers. The basic concept behind content marketing is that providing quality content on relevant topics to customers results in an increase in leads and sales conversions. It also helps improve search engine ranking and can be used to fuel the growth of a company’s presence on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
Choosing A Content Curation Tool
When choosing a content curation tool, it is important to look at your content marketing strategy to help make an informed decision. Most companies will need a curation tool to help them monitor and aggregate content from social media sites, social networks, blogs and news aggregators for regular blog posts, email newsletters, and sharing via social media.
Our analysis of Storify and Storyful will include a brief summary, history and overview of key features.
Storify
Summary
Storify provides a set of tools to search social media, social networking sites and collect content such as blog posts, photos, videos and tweets. This content can be organized, integrated with other content and published on social media sites as well as embedded in web pages.
History
Storify launched as a private beta in September 2010 at TechCrunch Disrupt. In April 2011, Storify went into public beta. That same year the content curation tool was named one of the 5 best websites of 211 by TIME magazine and won South by Southwest’s Startup Accelerator contest.
Features
- Aggregate content from many sources including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, RSS feeds, Instagram and Flickr
- Keyword searching across multiple sources and social media sites
- Organize aggregated content to build a social story
- Add content to social stories to give content and enhance them
- Embed stories on website and share on social media sites
- Notifies Twitter users when their content is featured in a story
Storyful
Summary
Storyful is a content curation tool focused on helping people discover great content as well as give a voice to people sharing breaking stories or reporting on the ground. It provides the ability to curate content from social media in real time. Storyful is focused on transforming social media into a trusted news source. It also provides social features that make it easier share important stories irrespective of the size or clout of the source.
History
Storyful was founded in April 2010 by Irish journalist, tv presenter and author Mark Little. The inspiration for Storyful came from his own experience in the field of journalism, and the need to be able to discover important news among the constant flood of new content on social media sites. In December 2011, Storyful closed an investment round from AIB Start-Up Accelerator Fund that is managed by ACT Venture Capital.
Features
- Community pages focused on specific topic
- Post and share content with community pages
- Social sharing with friends on Facebook and Twitter
- Find sources, linkes and references within content
Next Time
If you have a specific content curation tool you would like us to include in our analysis, please let us know by leaving a comment.
For more content marketing advice, check out the What is Content Marketing series.