Using Content Discovery & Curation To Power Content

A common goal of content and social media marketing campaigns is to drive more traffic to our websites.

Businesses swear by the power of great content in engaging their target audience and encouraging them to interact more often and more personally with their brand.

Authoritative, useful and share-worthy content is the first step to attracting more leads, fans, followers, subscribers and sales opportunities. But it's also the most challenging step.

Doing research, finding relevant stories to share,or identifying problems or trending topics around your target audience is just too time-consuming.

That's where content discovery tools can make a meaningful difference. They enable you to work smarter and save you a lot of time.

There are several content discovery tools available online that open up audience engagement and marketing opportunities before you. The question is how can you use them to improve the return on your content/social media marketing campaigns?

1. Help Deliver Fresh Content That Keeps Your Audience Interested

Content discovery tools crawl thousands of content items online; case studies, top news, infographics, videos, images, presentations.

They make a variety of content available on-demand, in real time, introducing you to several new ideas and topics for your posts.

Capitalize on a trending topic to start conversations on your social media pages or blog. Discover a rarely or never-before-discussed aspect of a product or law and create a compelling white paper or video around it.

Provide your audience unexpected information that makes them sit up, take notice, and take action.

Tools

Hoosuite, Klout and DrumUp provide good -- automated -- content recommendations sourced from thousands of items online.

Though they require more effort than traditional content marketing tools, Feedly and Scoop.it are popular among businesses seeking fresh content.

With Scoop.it's continuous stream of relevant, keyword-focused content, you can develop the week's editorial calendar quickly, without breaking a sweat.

Feedly serves as your one-stop destination for reading, sharing and staying updated with content from popular blogs, websites and magazines.

2. Gain & Spread Industry Awareness

The road to remarkable content is paved with discovery and awareness. Without a content discovery tool, you are just searching for answers to your specific questions, and limiting the variety of content you can potentially create. When you're discovering content using a quality tool, you're enhancing your understanding of and knowledge about your industry and customers.

Plug into a vast pool of relevant content to increase your awareness and help your audience increase theirs; they'll appreciate it and regard you as a brand to trust. Do keep in mind that to position your brand more authoritatively before your target audience, just discovering highly relevant and extremely valuable topic suggestions won't suffice. You need to structure, reason, prove a point, look at both sides of the issue, and/or analyze different perspectives and some existing literature on the subject, to create content that gets shared, commented on and elicits response from your audience.

3. Curate Content To Add Discipline And Value To Your Content Marketing Campaigns

When you're curating content, you're basically organizing and making sense of all the relevant content available to you.

With A Content Discovery And Curation Tool, You Can:

• Feed your audience with relevant and useful content
• Pump up social shares through blog links and retweets from your audience, and from the authors you curated
• Share, annotate and archive content
• Honor the spirit of authorship
• Categorize, organize, co-ordinate and plan topics to stay firmly in control of your content and social media marketing campaigns

You Don't Have To:

• Reposition or duplicate existing content
• Infringe upon the original creator's/contributor's copyright
• Avoid the risk of being penalized by Google
• Compromise on quality and authenticity

Spundge aggregates content from a variety of sources to help you curate content for your WordPress blog, social networks or other content publishing platforms. The tool allows you to create 'stories' and 'notebooks' around keywords and topics relevant to you. With BuzzSumo, you can discover content by social network, content type, domain and author to stay on the pulse of what's trending, and curate to increase your social media shares.

4. Makes Content Marketing More Efficient

Content and social media marketing is a continuous effort. Unless you have a method, schedule and a commitment towards effective audience engagement, you may struggle to derive tangible business benefits.

• Cut down on the time you would have otherwise spent on identifying topics of interest on search engines. Let a content discovery tool do the job for you.
• Set a time deadline for different tasks such as finalizing topics, creating the content and posting it in line with your editorial calendar. This will eliminate the risk of static blogs and social media pages.
• Connect and collaborate with influencers and other users that you may meet while using content discovery tools. It can help you get more ideas, learn about new topics of interest, and finalize the direction of content creation and publishing in a more efficient and informed manner.