I was recently asked by Bill Gasset: “how does one go about being in the recommended feed in the side panel for a specific topic?” As this is a question we frequently have, I thought I would turn my answer to him into a blog post so we can not only help other Scoopiteers benefit from it but also enrich it with your comments, ideas and suggestions.
1. Suggest content to other fellow curators, targeting those in your interests.
For instance, as a real-estate expert, you can go to the Real Estate interest through the navigation menu next to the search field and find the recommended topics and users in there. Once on a topic page, use the Suggest button at the top as explained in this great video made by Scoopiteer Andy Nathan.
Content suggested that way appears at the top of the curator’s suggested content in the side panel. It’s then up to them to decide whether to reject it or accept it.
An important tip is to make sure the suggested content fits the curator’s editorial line: no one likes to receive spam there (and if you’re marked spam by a user, your next suggestions won’t show up in their feeds). But when done well, this helps other curators and it’s a great way to create connections with other curators in your field and build up your community of interests.
2. Just scoop it!
By default, new topics have the latest and best scoops which match their keywords among their suggested content (on top of content crawled by our semantic technology through other sources such as Twitter, blogs, etc…). The same magic technology that crawls more than 10M Web pages every day to find great suggestions around the Web also crawls Scoop.it for the same content. So by publishing regularly relevant content on a given set of keywords, you increase your chances of appearing there.
3. Scoop your original content
While scooping only original content could defeat the purpose, adding it to your curation brings an additional distribution channel as explained by Ally here (tip #9). Good content will likely be rescooped by other curators as they see it in their followed topics or content suggestions.
4. Earn recommendations and badges
Interest channels mentioned above prominently feature the topics which have earned recommendations from other users. This is how it works. The whole idea of this system is to reward quality curators with greater exposure and visibility.
5. Build your community of interest
Every time you follow, rescoop or recommend another curators’ content, they receive a notification. This is an opportunity for them to check you out and potentially reciprocate. While none of this is of course systematic, users who have authentic, quality curations benefit a lot from the social features Scoop.it offers. You can start with Scoopiteers sharing your interests. As you build your community of interests on Scoop.it, they will not only naturally rescoop from you but will also be more likely to accept your content suggestions.
Scoop.it is fundamentally an interest-based platform and our ambition has always been to help people sharing similar interests connect around content. We’ve seen many testimonials of users saying the platform helped them get traffic and visibility through this model. The above are the main tips we thought about but we’d also love to hear yours: what have you found useful when trying to get more visibility to your content?
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I try to be a “quality curator” but with an aversion to marketing, I’m small beans in the Scoopit world. Still want to thank you and I enjoy using Scoopit to find and share interesting stories and pictures.
Scoopiteers? I like it! I’ve been on Scoop.it for a while now. Learning it would have been much easier if I didn’t have an attitude that I knew it all! 🙂 (Joking.) Today I just connected my WordPress blog to my account. Would have done it sooner. Took that long for the “light bulb in my head†to go off. Better late than never! ~ Sincerely, I remain your loyal Scoopiteer!