The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

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Why you need to create a content marketing strategy

Posted on
August 20, 2015
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Why you need to create a content marketing strategy

The most popular digital marketing mantra in recent years has been “Content is King”, and while the mantra itself may be a touch overused, it is by no means inaccurate. Now more than ever it’s incredibly important to create – not just a content marketing strategy but – your own unique content marketing strategy if you hope to drive traffic and boost brand awareness from online channels.

This article dives into a bit of background on the recent popularity of content marketing, why you need to develop a content marketing strategy that is unique, and shows you where to find some of the newest strategies to set yourself apart from your competitors.

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How to balance virality and utility in content marketing

Posted on
August 17, 2015
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How to balance virality and utility in content marketing

When people talk of the “quality” of a piece of content, they’re generally referring to its value in terms of captivating an audience or attracting attention to the brand. They might be referring to the depth of research, the style of the writing, or the overall appeal of the topic, but if you boil down the value of a piece to its capacity to engage an audience, you end up with two major factors: its virality and its utility. 

Virality is the potential for a piece of content to “go viral” or circulate amongst audience members and achieve more visibility. Viral pieces are important because they cause the piece to have a greater range of impact, and grant greater overall visibility for the brand. Utility is the overall usefulness of a piece of content for an individual reader. For example, a how-to article holds more utility for a reader than a piece about a company’s operational anniversary.

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12 signs you’re wasting time on content marketing

Posted on
August 10, 2015
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12 signs you're wasting time on content marketing

Lack of time came in as the #1 challenge for both B2B and B2C marketers in the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs 2014 Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends surveys.

If you’re not sure you’re using your time well enough, or if you’d like a checklist of content marketing areas to emphasize, the following list may be helpful. Each item of this list is a sign you’re wasting time on content marketing. Or – on the brighter side – an opportunity to boost your productivity.

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How to write good blog posts for your audience and SEO and make sure they perform

Posted on
August 3, 2015
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How to write good blog posts for your audience and SEO and make sure they perform

When I try to write good blog posts, it automatically becomes more difficult than it would be to have an interesting debate with someone, even if I had the same discussion and arguments. Ok first, what is a good blog post? It’s – of course – a post that converts. That brings you traffic. Leads. Revenue, you might dare? For that, your content needs to delight your audience. And if you want your audience to find this beautiful piece of content you spent hours writing, it needs to be SEO-proofed.


I was discussing with a friend last week and he asked me if I had a “process” in place that I followed when writing a blog post. No, I didn’t have a checklist with items that I crossed off to make sure I didn’t forget anything. But shouldn’t I?


That got me thinking about the methodology I built over time for my writing purposes (and that I’m sure I did not invent but whatever) and also to promote it accordingly. Unconsciously I use that methodology to try and write good blog posts, curate an existing post, or even re-work an article of a guest blogger. So I tried to lay down a list of these steps for you, hoping you can relate and use it at some point. Let me know if you liked it or if you’d add anything to it!

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Does ethical content curation exist? A data-driven answer

Posted on
July 30, 2015
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Does ethical content curation exist

Ever since we started to work on Scoop.it, we’ve had this question: is it fair to use other people’s content for your own good: in other words, how ethical is content curation? Is it even legal?

A quick look at history clearly shows that artists and scientists never created in a vacuum but have always leveraged pre-existing work to develop their own. And that’s for the greater good. Closer to us, there is a multitude of online media sites which embraced content curation as an alternative or a complement to the content they produce: the Huffington Post is a famous example but Upworthy and BuzzFeed are others and even the respected New York times started doing it.

Of course, such an answer won’t satisfy your legal department or your own need to have a more pragmatic answer. So as we’ve now been arounds for several years and, more importantly, have seen millions of users publish more than 100 million pieces of content, we feel we can not only give you a recap of the facts that make content curation ethical but also back that out with data.

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5 easy ways to curate content on your blog

Posted on
July 28, 2015
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5 easy ways to curate content on your blog

Content curation is a bit of an art form, and takes some time to perfect. But once you’ve figured out a strategy that works, you’ll have a process in place for regularly finding, compiling and editorializing content your audience will love!

Where to source content for curation

In order to curate content, you first need to find it. The net is teeming with information ripe for curation, but the challenge is finding relevant content in a timely manner.

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Content curation and website traffic: study finds 464% growth in 4 months

Posted on
July 27, 2015
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weekly traffic growth 464x with content curation

This is a very interesting case study by the team at B2B Content Engine on content curation and website traffic: it analyzes the impact content curation has on a B2B web site’s traffic. B2B sites typically have niche audiences which are hard to find from untargeted methods and costly to generate with targeted advertising.

Content curation and website traffic are correlated.

What this study shows is that consistent content curation provided not only impressive results on traffic growth but also lead generation conversion at a 12% rate. In addition to many other great benefits such as brand visibility, awareness, etc…

It also gives an idea of the volume of content that was required to achieve that, which is very reasonable.

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Increase Facebook reach without paying for advertising

Posted on
July 21, 2015
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Increase Facebook reach without paying for advertising

Ahh, Facebook. We love to hate on them don’t we. It’s no surprise by now that Facebook organic reach is on its way out. We feel it on our pages and I’m sure you feel it on your pages too.
It’s getting harder and harder to avoid paying Facebook for visibility. The idyllic days when you could build a following and engagement on social networks through the shear strength of your community management skills seem like a fading memory.

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Scoop.it ranks best content marketing software app by GetApp

Posted on
July 13, 2015
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Scoop.it ranked best content marketing software app by GetApp

We’re proud to be ranked best content marketing software app in GetApp’s Q2 2015 GetRank of the t​op 25 content marketing solutions.

GetApp is the largest cloud­-based business apps marketplace. In the four different categories evaluated, Infusionsoft took the top spot in Marketing Automation, Mailchimp in Email Marketing, Scoop.it in Content Marketing and Hootsuite in Social Media Marketing.

The goal of the ranking is to provide valuable data to businesses looking to make a first assessment when looking for the best content marketing software. GetApp’s ranking was determined using data collected from GetApp and other third­-party sources. Factors used to calculate an app’s ranking include User Generated Reviews, Integrations, Mobile Platforms, Media Presence, and Security. The ranking will be updated every quarter to reflect newly available data.

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Is your content marketing strategy paying off?

Posted on
July 9, 2015
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Is your content marketing strategy paying off?

Content marketing strategy is one of the most popular online strategies nowadays, and for good reason. It’s generally hailed as a cost-effective strategy that generates compounding returns over time, as the longer you remain consistent with your approach, the more growth you’ll inevitably see. However, because content marketing affects many different areas of your business’s online visibility—from search engine ranks to far less quantifiable metrics like brand awareness—it can be difficult to tell whether all your efforts are actually paying off.

Some benefits of content marketing are simply unquantifiable—they’re qualitative and often subjective, and because of that it’s hard to reach an objective value. Still, with the knowledge and tools you do have, it’s possible to calculate whether or not your current content marketing efforts are adding value to your online marketing campaign.

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Content curation should be a daily habit for all marketers

Posted on
July 7, 2015
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It is possible to build daily habits that guarantee to give you higher ranking and greater marketing success. Here are the habits you should cultivate.
Read the full article at: www.searchenginejournal.com

In his article, Neil Patel lists 5 daily habits you can (and should) start doing if you want your rankings to go up and get more results out of your content marketing efforts:

1. Write and publish one article – 1 hour per day for 1 to 2 articles per week.

2. Update one old article – 10 min per day.

3. Post a link to an article on every social media platform – 5 min per day.

4. Interact on one forum – 10 min per day.

5. Reply to one Tweet, Google+ update, Facebook post, and LinkedIn discussion, etc. – 10 min per day.

He explains exactly why you should get these 5 habits to ensure you greater results in your content marketing strategy and then gives you practical insights on how to master those habits.

This list is great and I try my best to spend about an hour doing them every day, simply because they do work. Given our experience, I’d like to talk about a sixth practice that has had a real impact on our content marketing ROI, and that I’m sure Neil would like. Let me know Neil! 🙂

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How to make your content ridiculously easy to share

Posted on
July 6, 2015
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How to make your content ridiculously easy to share

Sharing is caring. It’s cliché, but oh so true. While share counts may not be directly tied to your social media and content marketing ROI, many brand publishers measure the success of a piece of content by how many shares it gets.

In earlier posts we’ve talked about the psychological motivations behind what makes people want to share. We’ve also covered how to get in your audience’s head to find out what they want you to share (in other words – what they’re most interested in). For this installment of the sharing series, we’re focused on helping you make content easy to share by formatting it. These are all the tips and tricks of formatting and timing that have been shown to make a difference.

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Posted in
Social Media

Why no one is sharing your content [and 3 strategies to fix it]

Posted on
June 29, 2015
by
Why No One is Sharing Your Content [and 3 Strategies to Fix It]

Are you embarrassed by the social sharing counts on your blog posts? Do you hit publish… only to hear crickets?

If you’re not getting many – or any – shares for your content, there is one bright spot: You’re not alone. I’ve seen hundreds of good, even great blog posts with single digit share counts. On any given day, thousands of unshared updates stream through my social media accounts.

As you know, there’s a tremendous amount of content getting published. If you’re not getting any sharing love, consider what you’re up against. This infographic from Domo  outlines the situation well. It shows how much content is published every minute. And it doesn’t even count the 2 million blog posts published every day.

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Posted in
Social Media

Publish quality content on your blog: quantity matters too!

Posted on
June 25, 2015
by
Publish good content on your blog - quantity matters too!

Companies tend to struggle to create and publish good content on their blog. If you’re a marketer, you’re most likely not a professional writer. Hence it can be difficult to figure out what your audience is interested in, write good content around those topics, all while running your other marketing tasks. And when your segment has many big actors with content marketing teams dedicated to maintaining an efficient blog, it can be challenging to try and compete with them. So it’s important to understand what matters in terms of content quantity and quality.

Publish good content, yes indeed. Here’s how.

If “Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left” – according to Seth Godin (best selling author, entrepreneur, marketer and public speaker) -, you want to do things right.

If you want to do things right and publish good content, you should…

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Mobile content curation: save (even more) time publishing content with the new Scoop.it iPhone App

Posted on
June 22, 2015
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Save time publishing content with the new Scoop.it iPhone App

No matter how good blogging Apps like the beautiful Wordpress App can be, writing 800 words on your iPhone will never be easy. But just like pictures, curated posts are a natural fit for mobile users. Why? First, reading news on smartphones has become common and second, the creation effort involved in curation is more limited: adding a 150-200 word insights to something you’ve read and selected is easy.

So today, we’re glad to give you a tour of the new Scoop.it App for iPhone that, according to MarketingHits founder Brian Yanish who was among the firsts to spot it on the App store, is “making it easier than ever to curate“.

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Posted in
Product News

Compelling infographics: 4 tips content marketers should follow

Posted on
June 18, 2015
by
what-is-an-infographic2

As content marketing has grown in popularity, marketers have become more familiar with how customers like to interact with information online. Visual content is a great cure for short attention spans, conveying a message succinctly, and it has the added benefit of presenting information in a shareable format. When a customer can see concepts illustrated in colorful, well-designed and compelling infographics, that customer may be better able to grasp those concepts than if they were outlined in writing. But if you want to make compelling infographics, you have to put some effort into it. Infographics are often driven by content, so it’s important to have a solid background before starting. Marketers should also have several unbiased people review the infographic to make sure it makes sense before publishing it. Here are a few ways infographics are gradually changing content marketing as we know it today.

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How to improve SEO – the power of content curation

Posted on
June 16, 2015
by

90% of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years? Faced with this huge, ever-increasing amount of data, threatened by social networks such as Facebook, search engines had to adapt or die. They found a better way of identifying quality and relevant content that genuinely addressed users’ needs. How can companies improve SEO to comply with secret algorithms that are constantly being revised by search engines?
Improve SEO by not doing SEO
That’s right! The old SEO is dead. Backlinks-only strategies are not only inefficient but condoned by search engines. As Neil Patel says, “you can’t just pop up an ugly website, throw up mediocre content, build a few links and expect to rank well”.
The only way to improve SEO now is to understand the new SEO: content marketing. Don’t do SEO, Search Engine Optimization like we meant it when the acronym was invented. Do content. Content that you audience cares about. Content that brings them added value. That’s how search engines feed their first page.

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Audience and Content Publishing: 17 Ways to Find Out What Your Audience Wants You to Share

Posted on
June 9, 2015
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audience and content publishing - 17 Ways to Find Out What Your Audience Wants You to Share

Ever had a piece of content go viral? It’s a heady experience. Maybe it took off immediately and you watched the share count go up like a rocket ship. Or maybe it was a slow burn, but week after week, you kept shaking your head at how unbelievably well that one piece of content did.

Any time this happens the most powerful response (after “That did AWESOME! I rock!”) is to try to do it again. Ad agencies get irked when clients tell them “we want it go viral” because they’ve gotten this request so many times. Everybody wants their stuff to go viral. Who would say, “we’d like this to go largely unnoticed.”

Odds are you don’t know how to make things go viral every time. Hey, neither do I. But I do know how to increase the chances of it happening. I’m about to show you how to increase the chances of going viral for your stuff, too. Not just viral wildfire once – and maybe not every time – but often enough to make your competition jealous and to leave your audience enthralled.

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How we built a resource center without resources (and doubled our traffic)

Posted on
June 8, 2015
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The new Scoop.it resource center: useful content for content marketers

Content Marketing is about sharing and education. It’s about being useful to your audience. As Carlton Hoyt was pointing out on the Content Marketing Institute’s blog: “Stop Thinking Content, Start Thinking Resources”

At Scoop.it, we’ve always been eager to learn. We do that by curating great content from influencers, by deriving our own conclusions from our own experiments and by sharing with the Scoop.it community on this blog and on our social channels to spread the results and collect feedback.

We’ve been doing that for some time now and even though we never had more than one full-time employee in charge of content, we now have a pretty big collection of content published including:

While we’re certainly happy with this ramp-up and while this content helps on a daily or weekly basis, we’ve been progressively wondering about the following questions:
  • How should we structure this wide variety of content so that it’s useful for our audience not just today but over time?
  • How do we do that in such a way that is the least time-consuming and the most efficient?

So as we’ve seen many marketers go through the same questions, we felt it would be interesting to share what we learned on this question, what mistakes we made and what successes we had.

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How to be good at marketing without a CMO (or a good one) – tips for marketers

Posted on
June 4, 2015
by
Tips to marketing professionals who have to live without a (good) CMO

I really liked Dan Stasiewski’s article about the 8 mistakes CMOs make when structuring their marketing teams and I was going to curate it and add a few lines about what to do to be good at marketing without a CMO (or a good one). I got carried away. I’m not reinventing the wheel here, but sharing my own experience on how to manage and thrive as a marketing professional even when you’re not lucky enough to have a CMO or marketing leader – or even a team!- to help you structure things around.

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How to nurture leads with content curation

Posted on
June 1, 2015
by
How to Nurture Leads with Content Curation 2

Want more leads? You’re not alone. According to IDG Enterprise’s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report, lead generation is the #1 priority for content marketers.
But while everybody says they want more leads, in the very next breathe they’ll add that they want better leads, too. That’s why you’ll see lead nurturing come in as priority #4 on this same graph. Lead nurturing is basically lead generation 2.0. First you get the leads, then you warm them up.

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Is content marketing hard? 7 lessons learned +1 (curation)

Posted on
May 28, 2015
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In this article, Mike Huber rightly says “more is what you need when it comes to content marketing”, and then points out in 6. that “your team needs to be all in”.  And since “the best time to start a content marketing program is 5 years ago and the second best time is today”, you’d better start publishing content regularly now.
Our experience adds one lesson to this post: “curation helps you publish more”. And not just more, also better.

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Don’t Limit Your Content Marketing Team: Grow Your Content Production and Reach with Contributors

Posted on
May 14, 2015
by
You Can’t Do it All on Your Own- Extend Your Content Marketing Team

Despite what my friend Eddie would say, even Messi can’t do it alone. Let’s see if some of these quotes I heard or felt about my content marketing team sound familiar:

“I’m always behind on my publishing goals”.

“I know if I had more content to distribute I would have more traffic on my website, but I don’t have enough resources to write this content”.

“My co-workers who are supposed to write something for me keep pushing back the deadline”.

“I can’t constantly follow up with all my co-workers to make sure they share my content to their social network”.

Rings a bell? Don’t worry there are ways to cope with that.

First of all, if you’re still not sure how content curation can solve some of your content struggles, then have a look at this must-read post by Heidi Cohen on the 3 no-brainer reasons you should start curating content, and then come back here for more tips.

I’ve identified two reasons to expand your content marketing team that can really help you increase your content production and your content reach: extend the party committee so others can write and curate with you, and/or leverage your co-workers’ social audience.

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Influencer Activation – The Key To Content Marketing Amplification

Posted on
May 12, 2015
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Influencer Activation - The Key To Content Marketing Amplification

We’ve said it before: 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past 2 years, and content marketing is approaching mass adoption. How can you break through the noise and get your message to the right people at the right time?

Many marketers are turning to influencers for content marketing amplification – in fact, a recent poll of 125 marketers shows 59% plan to increase their influencer marketing budget over the next 12 months. This means more marketing departments are devoting time and resources to creating authentic relationships with the people who matter most to their business – influencers who shape the industry as trusted resources.

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How to Make Old Content Topics More Exciting

Posted on
May 11, 2015
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How to Make Old Content Topics More Exciting

Obviously, one of the best ways to stay exciting is to look to what’s new—read up on industry news, check out your competitors’ blogs, and listen to what your customers are talking about, and use that information to generate some fresh, new material. However, this isn’t always possible. When it isn’t, you’ll have to look back at some of the older topics you’ve covered and find a way to present them as if they’re new—in a fresh, exciting way.

There are several strategies you can use to accomplish this.

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