Year in review: our key achievements in 2016

As we’re entering 2017, we wanted to share with you a recap of what we did last year and share some thoughts on what we’ll be working on this year.

2016 was another busy year for us:

• We passed 3,000,000 users on the Scoop.it platform.
• Overall the content they published received more than 185 millions views, another proof if needed that great content drives traffic.
• Scoop.it turned 5 in November.

We’re grateful for your continuous support as we couldn’t possibly have achieved these great milestones without you. On behalf of the whole team, thank you!

So let’s review the main new product features we launched in 2016.

We leveraged AI R&D work to introduce content marketing intelligence

Product-wise, our main event last year was the result of our R&D work on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and that led to the launch of the V2 of Scoop.it Content Director. Building our suggestion engine and getting so many users on the platform provided us with a huge amount of data. Adding AI technology to make sense of this data seemed like a natural steps as many marketers struggle themselves with understanding what works and what doesn’t with their content.

“Of course I want to be as time-efficient as possible. But rather than doing it faster, it’s more about being smarter. So that the hard work that I put into content has more potential of being successful.” – Bernie Borges

Scoop.it Content Director first version focused on saving time to marketers by combining our curation technology with an automated workflow of the content marketing lifecycle. Leveraging AI, our V2 brought content marketing intelligence as a way to help marketers not just work faster but also smarter.

“Our goal is actually not to create more content. Ideally we’d want to create the minimum amount of content with the maximum amount of results.” – Joe Pulizzi

Opportunities: predictive insights that give you more results without doing more work 

This feature gives you predictive insights on your content performance so you can generate more results without doing more work and understand better what content to create next.

Improved content marketing analytics to precisely measure and report your content ROI and impact on lead generation

We improved our content marketing analytics to provide better and more actionable insights to content marketers:

• Detailed content analytics for each post to precisely measure the ROI of your content and what results your various distribution and promotion actions drove.
• New CSV analytics export to give you flexibility to generate custom reports for your team or your agency clients.
• Lead tracking integration with Marketo, HubSpot, Mailchimp so you can understand exactly how many leads each piece of content generated, a lead being defined the way you define it in your marketing automation or email list system.

 

We launched features to help you create more and better content faster

Given our background as a content curation platform, Scoop.it Content Director initially leveraged third-party content to generate curated blog posts or curated email newsletters. But in 2016, we also added features to help you create content from scratch:

Google Drive integration to instantly turn Google Docs into blog posts

Our integration with Google Drive lets you create blog posts directly from Google Documents that have been authored or edited by your team. This system builds on a platform many of you use to collaborate on content creation, review and edit blog posts while enabling you to keep track of deadlines and publishing targets using Scoop.it Content Director’s Smart Calendar. Even better, this feature automatically formats your Google Document as a blog post in your WordPress site so you don’t have to waste time copy / pasting images or adding broken hypertext links.

New email module to craft a newsletter in less than 10 minutes

This V3 of our email newsletter editor builds on the drag-and-drop UX that we introduced in the previous version but also brings a lot more flexibility by letting you add various widgets for text, images or HTML in your newsletter template. The result is lightning fast, fully branded and completely customizable email newsletters creation.

Image library to easily retrieve and repurpose your blog’s visuals

Whether for curated or original content, visuals play a key role in grabbing readers’ attention. But they can also consume a good part of your content publishing process. With the image library feature we introduced last year, Scoop.it Content Director synchronizes all the images from your blog so you can recycle the ones you want for each and every post you schedule or publish. By repurposing your previous investment, you save time getting content published with impacting and brand-compliant images.

Because hitting publish is just the beginning, we brought you smart automated distribution

Hitting publish is not the end of the content marketing lifecyle. Creating content is just the first part of the work. Without proper distribution, your content won’t bring the desired results: attracting new targeted visitors to your website, improving your SEO, engaging and converting your social media audience…

Building on the integrations we built from the start with major social networks, we took content distribution to the next level last year.

New channel: share to Pinterest

Follow integrations with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, etc… we were glad to add Pinterest to the list of destinations we support – something many of you asked us for and that became possible through the release of Pinterest third-party API. This new integration enables you to distribute both your original (in Scoop.it Content Director) and curated content (in Scoop.it Content Director and Scoop.it free and premium plans).

Promote: the feature that automates the delivery of your content to your followers multiple times over multiple channels

The time when you could share your content once and expect to get 10-15% engagement is simply gone. The lifetime of a tweet is less than 25 minutes and you’re luck when you have more than 5% reach on a Facebook page. This content overload means that sharing is not enough. For each piece of content you create, you need to have a comprehensive promotion plan consisting in sharing it multiple times over multiple channels – a best practice most content marketing influencers recommend and that was instrumental in Jeff Bullas’ success in building an audience from scratch.

“I started re-sharing older content over and over around 2011. Many social media purists thought that it was bad to automate sharing as social media was about people not machines. But it worked and I kept going despite the throwing of stones from the sidelines! These tactics were key to growing my Twitter following that now stands at 465,000+ and building my site traffic to over 5 million hits per year.” – Jeff Bullas

To make that possible, we introduced Promote. Determine the channels you want to distibute your content too, select the number of times you want your content shared on each of these channels and… voilà! Scoop.it Content Director takes care of the rest and programs these multiple shares over time in order to reach the most of your audience while avoiding follower fatigue.

Support of Twitter handles and hashtag in Scoop.it Content Director

Another great way to generate impact for your content is to involve your community in co-creation. As Andy Crestodina puts it, “an ally in creation is an ally in promotion”. With the evolution of our integration with Twitter, you can now easily mention a Twitter account or add a hashtag as you promote your content on Twitter. Mention influencers you quote, contributors to your content or members of your community you want to get the attention of. Get your content seen by like-minded people by using targeted hashtags. 

Share as video on Twitter

In the same spirit of building on the impact of visuals to generate more engagement, you can now directly embed videos in your tweets when you share from the Scoop.it platform (available with all versions).

New embed format supporting sticky posts

Embedding Scoop.it topic pages is the easiest way to add curated content to your website. With this improved embed format, you can now star a post in your Scoop.it page to have it featured at the top of your embedded stream of curated content.

We kept building our knowledge sharing platform so you can work smarter as a team

Ever since we launched, we’ve had people reach out to use Scoop.it as a way to share curated news internally and privately within teams or organizations – something we answered by launching Scoop.it Knowledge Sharing, an enterprise-grade solution to disseminate market intelligence, third-party information and even internal documents efficiently. Last year, we kept adding to this platform by introducing the following features.

SSO integration through Okta for Scoop.it Knowledge Sharing

By integrating with Okta, we made it easier to support your corporate single-sign on system (SSO) as a way to onboard any team member you’d like. Instead of having each of them create their own Scoop.it account one by one, you can leverage this integration to provision as many accounts as you want in your team or organization. And also control which usage rights they have access to. 

Login / signup with your Google account for Scoop.it Knowledge Sharing 

Another alternative to simplify the onboarding to Scoop.it Knowledge Sharing for companies that run on Google Mail is to have coworkers use their Google account to signup or login. No password to remember, team members can signup or login in one click – a feature that encourages adoption across your company.

Newsletter analytics for Scoop.it Knowledge Sharing

The main channel through which Scoop.it Knowledge Sharing customers disseminate the content they’ve curated for their teams is via private internal email newsletters. Leveraging our email editor that automates newsletter creation makes it a 5-10 minute process. Last year, we added analytics to this module so you can measure the impact your internal newsletters have on your organization. 

What to expect in 2017

The above list summarizes the main features but there’s a lot more that we did, including a new iPhone App, Tag autocomplete, plus numerous revisions to our suggestion engine, our automation algorithms and our predictive insight engine. 

Most importantly, we’re not going to rest on our laurels and have much more in the pipe for 2017.

In this coming year, we’ll continue to focus our R&D work on leveraging artificial intelligence for content marketing. Being one of the most used content curation platforms in the world give us access to unique data on what we call “the relevant web” – the millions of posts that are meaningful enough to be curated and shared by our user base of professional experts. This puts us in a unique position to develop the best algorithms to help you guide your content marketing efforts.

Of course, we also want to keep improving the experience for all of our products. In 2017 as before, there’ll be improvements to design, features to simplify and new use cases to address. To do this, we’ll do what we’ve always done: collect your feedback. So let us know: what should we focus on building in our products this coming year?

And if you want to work smarter and start generating real results from your content marketing? Find out how to use the new Scoop.it Content Director to help you become a smarter marketer!

Image by Life of Pix