#legiblepractice

Last week, I tasked myself with looking into the many tools for content curation to help support our social media platforms and campaigns. Some of my key findings:

There is literally an app or website based tool for EVERYTHING

Many of theses programs are targeted for the social sector

The design of most is centred around ease of use and helping the "not-so-tech-savvy"

There is a difference between content curation and content aggregation

and lastly, there is LITERALLY AN APP OR WEBSITE BASED TOOL FOR EVERYTHING!

One of the more challenging concepts for me to get my head around, was the difference between content aggregation and content curation, and learning which would be the most beneficial for our present state.

"If you’re going to become a content curation pro, you’ll need to learn how to source the right content, and how to present this content to your fans in new and exciting ways. When you curate content for your social sites, it adds a new dimension to your pages."

Some of the sites I looked at during my research were

Buffer A tool that “automagically” shares posts you have scheduled and uploaded through the day, week or month.

InkyBee An “Influencer” finding tool that searches for people and content that may be relevant to your campaigns, as well as measuring the outcomes.

TagBoard”The hashtag-powered social hub”. Similar to Buffer, using hashtags as a way of sourcing content.

Edgar This is another post scheduling site that’s main claim is it stores every old post. It is very similar to the other curation tools though, so nothing really unique other than it’s user face.

Topsy Social media searcher and analytics in one!

and TweetDeck Live column streaming Twitter content. Good layout and usability, but as the name suggests, limited to Twitter.

Most of the features for the sites had key word searching as a main draw card, with the pretence that the user or organisation will set up the desired target areas and content based on their respective audiences.

They were all very similar with their approaches, with some, such as InkyBee, having more of a targeted social media platform. (InkyBee uses blogs). Others, such as Tagboard, were across multiple social media platforms, and wee therefore slightly more appealing to me as it meant I could reach all of our members across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

So, What is Content Aggregation?

"Content aggregation is the act of bringing together articles on a similar topic, grouping them together with no additional commentary or annotation."