Practical Writing Advice: Content Curation
Need some tools to help with content creation? Look no further!
Content curation is the art of collecting resources and information that interest your audience to share on your blog and social media. Before using the tools below, take a moment to list which topics you would like to find content about. If you’re a writer, you’ve likely already begun to collect content related to writing, your genre, and books. However, don’t be afraid to curate content that isn’t exclusively about books and writing. Feel free to share your other interests, such as your hobbies outside of your writing. Talking about your passions beyond writing may help you grow your audience and find new potential readers. Once you’ve found your topics, you can use the following tools to find content to share:
Feedly
From Logo Wiki
Feedly is a free RSS aggregator. If you’ve already got blogs and websites in mind related to your content, you can insert their RSS feed into Feedly, which will automatically show you the site’s new posts. You can organize the websites you want to follow into different topics as well as search for new sites.
Paper.li
Your own virtual newspaper service! Paper.li allows you to follow online newsletters related to a particular topic. These newsletters organize information from around the web for that topic, often consisting of blog posts, content shared on social media, and photos and videos. If you want to create your own newsletter, Paper.li provides the tools for that as well.
Twitter – Lists and Hashtags
Twitter lists are helpful for organizing users that post about a particular topic. As described in Rayne Hall’s helpful guide Twitter for Writers, if a user posts content that interests you but is unlikely to follow you back (such as celebrities you admired), you can still follow their tweets by placing them in a list instead of directly following their profile. This is especially useful if you are approaching the 2,000 following wall and need to unfollow profiles that still interest you.
If you use a tool such as Hootsuite, you can also follow hashtags related to your topic of choice. For example, if you’re a writer, #writetip and #pubtip are great ones to follow. This can also be helpful for finding users who enjoy your interests.
Alltop
Alltop logo: source
I found Alltop through Frances Caballo’s excellent guide to social media, Avoid Social Media Time Suck (which I previously reviewed and highly recommend). You can use Alltop to search for blogs and sites related to your interests and view their latest posts. Alltop and Feedly can work in tandem by using Alltop to find blogs and sites that you can then follow Feedly. For more information on content creation and creating a more effective social media strategy, definitely check out Caballo’s Avoid Social Media Time Suck.
Which tools do you find helpful for content curation?
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