Bookmarking is the act of saving links to web pages that users like or want to share. They use a social bookmarking site to store these links, separated by tags but it is not all-encompassing. Content curation is a broader term and means organizing the bookmarks in groups, thus creating stories, that can be personalized, edited and shared.The goal of content curation is, to compile and share quality content with your online following without rewriting what already exists, or creating your own.
Like everything in the Social Media world, the choice can be baffling, so I have chosen to narrow the list down to those with free options and which I feel are suitable for small businesses and start-ups.
Content Gems
contentgems.com is very simple to use. It is easy to navigate and simple to use. Just type in your search word e.g. ‘Social Media’ and it will display articles relating to your search words.
Free Package includes
- 1 Content Search
- 10 keywords
- Basic filtering and queries
- Daily content suggestions
- Weekly e-mail digest
- Monitor 1 personal
Twitter home timeline - 20 custom RSS feeds
- 0 source bundles
Feedly
Feedly is a website content curation tool that takes into account what your favorite sites (including blogs) are and repackages it as a personalized magazine.
Free Package includes
- Up to 100 sources
- Up to 3 feeds
- Up to 3 boards
- Mobile and desktop
www.Flipboard.com is a content curation tool that offers everything free of charge. Flipboard sources high-quality content from sources that rank well and have proved themselves trustworthy. The data, which will include text as well as videos, audio, images, and branding, is presented in a magazine format and is well organized to allow for easy viewing and user navigation.
Headslinger
http://headslinger.com Their tagline is ‘All the news, half the time’ and not only is everything free, it is also free of adds. Easy to search and easy to store.
Stumbleupon
Helps you discover new information. It display articles based on your preferences, lets you create lists of pages you like and browse trending information.
Digg
Digg.com is a user driven news website, connecting people to find, submit and reviews news stories from all over the web. Popular articles with enough ‘diggs’can get promoted to the homepage. All free option.
Free Content curation tools
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is great for anyone wanting to find and organize intellectual content to share with others. Individuals can create content in Scoop.it around keywords or areas of interest. Pages from anywhere in the web can be bookmarked including your own website pages. Scoop.it suggest additional content for the topic, based on the keywords. Scoop.it has a free of charge option which unfortunately has become quite limited.
- Topic pages 1
- Scoop / topic page 50
- Browser extension to scoop any link
- Rescoop from others curator
- Share scoop to 1 social channel
- Share directly to social (DirectLink)
Thinglink
https://www.thinglink.com/ works by developing interactive visual content based on your curated virtual resources library, improving your online visibility and user engagement when you share the data on your website and (or) social media platforms. Although the free option is very limited, it is a fun and interesting site to check out.
Trial Free Package includes
- For testing the potential of interactive images.
- Image editor
- 10k views total
- Support in 4 business days
Listly
https://list.ly/ Collect things you find on the Web – for research or personal use. Organize them into tagged lists that you can share and embed anywhere.
Free package includes
- 3 Free Lists for new users
- 1 List per week
- 10 Items per day
- WordPress Plugin for Embeds
Juxapost
Juxtapost sole ambition is to provide members with easy-to-use tools to “bookmark” the photos they find into categorized post-boards (collection of posts similar to Pinterest) that they can easily curate, even if their collection spirals to hundreds of websites.
The social discovery aspect of Juxtapost is just as simple. Members browse the streams of other members to see what they’re posting and have the option to comment, share or re-post items to their post-boards. The power of social discovery becomes readily apparent when you begin to follow people/friends with your similar style or tastes, it’s like browsing the web with all your friends and it all Free.
elink.io
https://elink.io/ is a visual collection of links that can be shared as an email newsletter, embedded on a blog/website or shared as a web page.
Free package includes
- Unlimited elinks
- Basic templates
- Ad banner
