Anyone familiar with social media marketing knows that it’s a good idea to share your work on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest and other major social media outlets. This article talks about two tools you can use to curate other people’s content (as well as your own) to expand your online visibility efforts, give people some visibility for their work, and engage with new people in the community that you want to build a relationship with.
Paper.li:
Paper.li is a way for anyone to create a daily (or weekly) newspaper of articles, videos, and graphics centered around a certain topic of your choosing and curated from around the interwebz. It’s free to use, and has premium features that you can pay for.
I really really like paper.li because it’s a great to connect with people with mutual interests, it generates the papers automatically, and takes little to no upkeep once it’s all set up. They usually end up being pretty quality papers too if you feed in the right sources.
It’s important to note that at the beginning, your content sources might not be the best. It’ll take some time to add new sources and filters and delete unwanted sources to get the right mix of curated articles.
The biggest problem that I see with paper.li is that it doesn’t have the option (yet) to cap the number of articles from one source, so if you pull in an RSS from a blog that posts a lot, it could take over the whole newspaper. They did say in a support thread that they are working on fixing that problem, so that’s good 🙂 Until the fix comes around, I’ve generally been using Twitter hashtags as the primary sources…it keeps the paper from getting too jammed with one source and allows anyone to have the potential to make the paper. You can also create filters so it will only pull articles if they include certain keywords.
If you’re using hashtags, definitely take advantage of the filters as needed to get the right articles curated. Also, if possible use more specific hashtags that less people are using to avoid all the noise. I really try not to weight hashtags like #internetmarketing very high, because you’ll get a lot of crap/spam articles and if I do, I’ll put in negative keyword filters to weed out some of the more lower quality articles.
Using Paper.li to increase social engagement.
If I have a client who’s working on their social media marketing on Twitter (e.g. an organization who provides services for kids with autism) I could create a newspaper for them that includes all of their articles they post plus articles from people on Twitter posting about #autism or #aspergers.
People love seeing the things they post end up in a newspaper and it gives you an opportunity to start engaging with the community you’re looking to connect with and people who are interested in what you do. It really signifies the shift that you’re not just highlighting your own work, but the work of the community as a whole. It’s very karmic it seems; people will probably be more willing to look at what you do once they know that you care about what they do.
I’ve had success in creating useful papers with good content for clients, my business, and topics that I’m interested in personally. Try it out!
A few paper.li papers that I helped set-up and manage for clients and myself:
Scoop.it:
I haven’t been using scoop.it for too long, but I think it’s a cool service that that’s worth checking out. Do a quick search on scoop.it for a topic that you’re interested in and you’ll probably see some pretty good curated results. It’s kind of like a person-centered search engine where the people that care about the topics determine what shows up in search results, as opposed to Google which is more algorithm-based.
Scoop.it is a great way to keep track of articles that I want to bookmark and organize (1 click from their browser shortcut bar). I’m starting to curate a couple scoops for “DIY SEO” and “Online Visibility” that eventually I’ll be able to share with people as a resource. There are some awesome scoops that people have generated centered around different topics that you can find. Check it out!
What other content curation tools and services do you like to use? Share in the comments! Also feel free to drop a link to your paper.li newspapers or Scoops.