Your primary job when it comes to content curation is to seek out relevant content that provides valuable information for your audience. While you’ll be saving some time, by being a content curator, when it comes to content creation, keep in mind that you’ll have to spend some time on research. And it can become very time consuming researching and seeking out the best content to share. However, there are a few tools you can use to help make your search easier.
Google Alerts
This is a cool tool. You can set up different keywords on topics you want to share with your readers and then every time someone publishes content (and it gets indexed by Google) on those keywords you’ve set up, Google Alerts will notify you via email. By default, it will email you once a day but you can change the settings to get more frequent updates if you wish.
One thing I want to mention with Google alerts is you should ‘narrow’ down your results. You want to get notifications on information that is going to be the most relevant to your readers. So the way to ‘narrow’ down the Google Alerts you get is to use quotation marks.
So, for example if you were to set up a Google Alert for fish you’re going to get really generic results about all kinds of fish. If your audience is interested in catfish then set up your Google Alert for “catfish” so that you only get notified about content with that exact phrase in it.
There is a lot more you can do with Google Alerts like using a minus sign (-) to leave out certain results you don’t want to get, etc. As already mentioned, Google Alerts is a really cool tool and you should definitely be utilizing it as a content curator.
Facebook Lists
Thanks to the list option that Facebook came out with, this is a great tool to also use for gathering content as a content curator. You can set up different lists based on different topics you’re interested in following to find valuable content to share with your readers. It’s really simple to set up your lists. If you want instructions, you can find them here.
Twitter
This is another great tool to use as a content curator. There are a few different ways you can utilize Twitter to seek out content. One way you can search for content is by checking out hashtags. If you’re not familiar with what a hashtag is, it’s simply a word/phrase with a pound (also known as hash) sign (#) in front of it. For example here are a handful of the many hashtags out there:
- #selfimprovement
- #life
- #entrepreneur
- #education
- #music
- #quotes
- #media
And the list goes on and on and on! This list doesn’t even begin to touch the surface of how many hashtags there are out there. But it gives you an idea of what they are. So, use hashtags to search for content that would be relevant to your audience. For example if you want to share information about entrepreneurs, do a search for #entrepreneur and you’ll see all the latest posts pop up that include that hashtag.
Another way you can use Twitter as a content curator is by creating lists. Set up different lists for different sources (people) you want to follow for content on specific topics. So, for example if there’s a social media guru that always shares great information, set up a social media list and add that person to that list so you can glance at it periodically to see if there’s any information you want to pull from there to curate and share with your readers.
Curation, Not Collection
There you have it, a list of 3 different tools you can use to make your research for content a little easier. These are all great tools to use to help collect content to share with your readers. Be selective and only share content that is valuable and will be helpful. And remember – make sure you’re curating and not simply collecting content.