Curating on mobile: the key to content curation consistency

Curating on mobile: the key to content curation consistency

One of the biggest challenges of content curation is staying consistent with it.

Content curation will support your long-term marketing and business goals, but only if you’re able to commit to it in the long run. If you curate every couple of weeks or months instead of multiple times a week, you just won’t see the results you want.

This applies to everything in your business, from internal communications and employee engagement through to email newsletters and content distribution. Consistency is key.

However, it’s easy to fall off track. As marketers and communicators, we get busy with more urgent tasks and projects. Our work supports product launches and revenue goals, so it can seem impossible to take our eyes off those goals to focus on long-term content curation efforts.

The solution lies in tweaking your workflow so that content curation is easy, no matter how busy you get.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to integrate mobile content curation into your process and how Scoop.it can help.

Why content curation on mobile is a must-have

Let’s go over some benefits of curating content on mobile.

Curate content even when you don’t have the time for it

You probably go through busier and quieter seasons in your work.

The quieter times allow you to structure your days and weeks strategically. You get to step away from deadlines and mountains of emails and set up a foundation for your marketing processes—including content curation.

But the busy seasons can significantly reduce that time you want to spend strategically. Some examples would be product launches, live events, intense community efforts, or anything else that requires high energy and lots of time.

The first thing you can do to save some time? Drop your weekly blocks of time when you curate content with purpose.

With a mobile content curation process in place, you can ensure that your channels—social media profiles, content hubs, and newsletter—don’t go quiet. Instead, you’ll be able to use much smaller pockets of time and add freshly curated content in minutes.

How? Your smartphone is always with you, so you’ll be able to quickly curate content during:

• Short breaks between meetings
• On your commute
• When catching up with emails and social media on your phone

Instead of waiting to have larger blocks of time you usually do, a great mobile curation workflow will let you curate in just a few taps, no matter how time-deprived you may be (we’ll show you how Scoop.it helps you do this in a later section).

Time spent on smartphones is increasing

As a marketer, you’ll naturally look for ways to stay efficient even when you get pulled into multiple directions and campaigns.

But this adjustment may not come naturally to other teams in your company. If you want to encourage employee advocacy through content curation, but only enable it through a desktop workflow, you may struggle to get buy-in and commitment from those teams.

As we already wrote before, content curation is most effective for employee advocacy when it:

• Relates to their specialties
• Sparks their genuine interest
• Helps them bring fresh insight into their networks

It’s important to add a fourth key element of effective content curation for employees: the ability to do it from all devices, not just their laptop or desktop.

Here’s why:

US-based data revealed that desktop media consumption slightly lowered from 2013 to 2019 (144 and 128 minutes respectively). During that same period, media consumption on smartphones went up from 88 to 203 minutes per day, surpassing desktop significantly.

This means that people spend more than three hours on their smartphone every day. If they come across a piece of content they can curate (in their email or while browsing news), but don’t have an easy way to do it, they likely won’t do it at all.

Mobile curation is even more important when you consider the amount of time people spend specifically on social networks when they’re on the go. Mobile-only social network users keep growing, while there’s a steady decline of desktop and laptop social network users every year.

A lot of the content your employees could curate likely comes from their social networks. If they access them frequently from their smartphones and you haven’t made mobile content curation easy for them, you’re missing out.

How to curate content on mobile with Scoop.it

Scoop.it’s powerful content curation engine is now fully available on mobile through the Scoop.it mobile app. Both iOS and Android apps were recently updated so you can make the most of content curation wherever you are.

Whether you want to curate the pieces you’re reading on your phone, finding on social media, or directly from the Scoop.it engine, the app makes it easy.

Here’s an overview of all the ways you can make mobile curation happen.

Get suggestions for your curated topics

The first section of the app, Curated, gives you access to all the topics you’re curating.

When you tap on one of your topics, you’ll see all your curated scoops in that topic and the option to see suggested content for that topic.

Here’s what it looks like:

1. My overview of topics
2. Inside my topic on content marketing
3. Suggested content I can curate (available from the top right corner on the previous screen)

To add new pieces of content to a topic from the available suggestions, all you need to do is tap on a piece you like, add your insight and tags, and tap Scoop. It only takes moments to do that!

If you want to tweak the suggestions you’re seeing, all you need to do is tap on the cog wheel at the top right and update your keywords.

Curate from content feeds you already trust

The second section of the app, Discover, lets you curate content based on what you follow from your Scoop.it account, including:

1. Scoops, which is a chronological feed of pieces that people you follow on Scoop.it have curated, starting with the newest ones
2. Topics, which is a list of topics you’ve followed on Scoop.it and you can tap on to curate from

The process of curating from here is just like the one in the previous section. When you see a piece of content you like, you tap the recycling icon at the top left of that piece, select the topic you want to add it to, add your insights and tags, and you’re good to go.

In this section, you can also use the search bar at the top right to search for posts, topics, or users using any search term you want. This is great if you have some extra time on your hands to expand your feed and find sources of content you haven’t used before.

Curate any piece of content you open on your phone

Finally, you can add any piece of content from your browser to your Scoop.it topics. This can include pieces that you:

• Received through direct emails or newsletters
• Came across on social media
• Got from a colleague through Slack and other instant messages

Here’s how it works.

1. When the piece of content you want to curate is opened in Safari, tap the Share icon.
2. Select the Scoop.it icon from your options. If you can’t see it, tap More and enable it from the list there.
3. Scoop.it app will open and populate a new scoop with information from this piece of content.
4. Add your insights and tags as usual and you’re done!

Mobile content curation just got easier

If you want to make sure you keep curating content, even when things get hectic, the Scoop.it app is your shortcut.

The app makes it easy to curate something you’re reading, but don’t want to move from your phone to your laptop. It also gives you instant suggestions for content to curate.

If you want to empower your employees and yourself to curate content consistently, even when you’re on the go, check out the Scoop.it mobile app in the App Store if you’re on an iPhone and Play Store if you’re on an Android phone.