To help you quickly and easily find content to share with your online communities, I’m sharing a few of my favorite tools in this post and an earlier one (click here to see it). Sharing useful, valuable content on your social media sites will build your reputation as a trusted resource – one important part of your personal branding strategy.
Your social media posts should include a mix of your original content and other people’s content. So check out the content curation tools below and see which one(s) work best for you.
1. Scoop.it
Scoop.it helps you create your own online “magazine” or hub for articles and resources that you find most interesting. Use the Scoop.it browser extension to easily add (or “scoop”) items you find on websites, and then share those items with your social sites (free accounts let you share to a maximum of 2 social sites). You can also search for items based on topics within the Scoop.it site.
2. Pulse
LinkedIn Pulse is another great option for finding content, especially since publishing has been opened for more users. You can customize your Pulse by topics or influencers, following people that create the kind of content you want to share.
3. Tagboard
TagBoard is a social media hub where you search for content with hashtags. Results are pulled from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Vine. You can also find out the definition of a specific hashtag if you are doing research before using it in your posts.
4. ContentGems
ContentGems says it “Monitor 200,000+ news sites, blogs, and social media accounts” for content. Search by custom keywords, filter content in several different ways, and receive a daily email with your top results.
5. Google Alerts / TalkWalker Alerts
These two tools (which are very similar), allow you to create an alert based on a keyword/phrase and receive an email with content based on those parameters.
It’s not necessary to use all of these tools at the same time; experiment with a few and when you find a system that works for you, just stick with it. No matter what tools you use, consistently updating your sites with fresh content is one of the keys to success in using social media for personal branding.