Six Great Alternatives to Hootsuite Suggestions to Curate Social Media Content
Hootsuite retired its suggestions feature on Feb 1st 2017, and many content marketers were left disappointed.
After all, content curation has been identified as a top challenge for marketers (according to a MarketingProfs study), and with content created rapidly growing year on year, it is easy to understand why apps that can curate content are increasingly becoming relevant and seen as live savers.
Benefits that a curation app provides its users
- A means to keep up with the latest in their niche
- A place to aggregate all the content important to them
- A way to appear more consumer centric on social networks
- A method to building important relationships with experts and influencers
- Inspiration for fresh and interesting content ideas
- A means to keep up with content demand without having to create massive amounts of content
Over 7500 tweets are sent out every second.
To compete, you need to tweet multiple times a day. Creating enough content to satisfy that demand isn’t easy, and posting too much of your own content can be construed as being too self-promotional.
You need a mix of original and curated content to create an engaging, useful, non sales-y and powerful social media presence.
Plus, over 2.5 million blog posts are published each day.
Manually skimming through them to find content to curate can prove a Herculean task. A curator can simplify the process.
Finding alternative tools to source content suggestions
The obvious solution is to find existing content curation tools that also offer social media management and scheduling.
DrumUp
You can use DrumUp if you need to manage multiple social media accounts, and source and schedule content on all of them. Once you have set up keywords on the tool, you can browse through the content suggestions it throws up daily.
The tool lets you schedule suggested posts to your accounts or save them in a content library for future use. Currently, it supports accounts and pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
You can also use keyword monitoring or social media listening apps to curate your content.
Brand24
You can use Brand24 if want to listen to social media mentions and turn them, or interesting blog posts into social media posts for your accounts. Create projects for different keywords that you want to monitor, to find blog posts about interesting topics in your niche, or content about your brand, created by your fans that you can curate and use on your social pages.
Yet another alternative is a content discovery site like StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon
You can use StumbleUpon to curate content in multiple formats – web pages, photographs or videos. The site automatically uses your opinions, expressed using a thumbs up or thumbs down to identify and share with you content that matches your preferences. This is a great site to discover general, entertaining content to share with your social media audience.
Finally, you can follow a selective group of people and curate their content, say the influencers in your niche, by adding them to Twitter lists.
Twitter lists
Twitter lets you create lists or groups of people to follow. When you access a specific list, you’ll see content from only the people that you have added on that list.
Personally, I prefer adding not more than 20 people one each list, because monitoring more content than that can be futile.
Each time you add someone to the list, they get notified, so ensure that you have a great name for your list.
There also exist news and story aggregation apps that give you the latest developments, keen insights and ideas to work with.
Flipboard is a news aggregation app that sources new stories from top news sites. When you create an account on the app, you are asked to state your preferences or areas of interest. Once you have done that, the app suggests content for you to read and share on a daily basis.
Flipboard is a great way to keep up with developments in your niche, should you require inspiration for your blog posts or social media posts.
Nuzzel
A Pew study revealed that 62% US adults gets the news via social networks.
More often than not, these are the news stories shared by their friends and family.
Nuzzel is a great way to curate the news stories that you connections are sharing on Twitter. If your Twitter community has your professional peers and experts in your field, Nuzzel can help you store and read the stories that they are sharing in an organized and easy way.
This can be a great way to test the pulse of your audience and see what is being talked about the most in your industry.
If you haven’t employed a content curator as of yet, you probably should, because the content created on social networks and by bloggers will only increase in the coming years.
Feature image via Flickr.com
