The Scoop.it Content Curation Blog

How content curation can help you to engage your audiences

Introducing The New Scoop.it Suggestion Engine: Bringing You More Relevant Content

Posted on
November 20, 2014
by

Every business’s marketing objectives require awesome content. Whether you’re focused on building thought leadership, increasing brand awareness, boosting SEO, engaging with an audience, or generating leads, it’s no longer a question that content marketing is the answer.

You create content, you outsource content, you curate content. Content curation has indeed proven its efficiency as a potent element of your editorial line, especially in terms of inbound marketing.

Now, the question remains: how do we turn this into a simple, scalable process?

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Posted in
Product News

Content curation on WordPress: how to do it right.

Posted on
November 14, 2014
by

Content Curation on Wordpress - how to do it right - compared benefits of the various solutions

One of the main ways to to leverage content curation for business is to add curated content to your website or blog. By selecting the most interesting content for your target audience and adding some context to it, you will naturally show your expertise to your visitors – a good objective in itself. But, if you do it right, you should also enjoy the following benefits:

  • Audience engagement as readers can now discover more interesting content than just your own stories or product news: loyal visitors will stay longer, hopping between related curated pieces, and have reasons for coming back or even subscribe to receive your email newsletters.

  • SEO as your Website now contains more quality content on your niche topic which can be indexed by Google. Not only will that content be well targeted and relevant but it will also be organized and contextualized which is what Google is looking for (more on seo benefits of content curation here).

  • Social Traffic as your readers can share content they like while directing traffic to your site (more on why you should use a content hub for your social media publishing here).

  • Conversions as readers of your curated content are not just clicking on links in your tweets or Facebook posts to end up on third-party websites, but are instead being directed to your own website that now acts as a content hub. You can incorporate call-to-actions in your hub to either contact you, subscribe to your newsletter or request a demo of your product (more on how to use content curation for inbound marketing and lead generation here).

So how do you integrate curated content to Wordpress in the right way, to reach these objectives?

Not all integrations are created equal, and some integrations will not deliver the above benefits in an optimal way. Here are the pros and cons of key integration options that you should be aware of:

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Report: SMBs Turn to Content Curation for Increased ROI

Posted on
November 13, 2014
by


As the beginning of the end of 2014 approaches, marketers are likely reflecting upon the last year, the trends that have caught on, and the trends that haven’t. At this time in 2013, the digital marketing world was abuzz about content marketing and content curation. Over the last year or so, marketing experts have been debating how much importance content curation should have within a content marketing strategy.

With over 1.5 million freemium users on our platform, we decided to take a closer look at what the data says for small businesses who have been using curation over the last year. The findings were quite interesting, especially when comparing the returns of content creation vs. the returns of content curation with respect to how much investment is put into them.

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3 Things To Begin With To Build A Strong Personal Brand

Posted on
November 13, 2014
by

what to focus your personal branding efforts on

Ever Googled yourself? What did you see? Did you like digital you? Are you visible in an Internet century? Here are the steps to creating a personal brand.

Source: www.jeffbullas.com

Five years ago, I didn’t think much of the concept of personal brand: it felt artificial and vain. I had a reputation of course and I felt strongly about it. But a brand? I also had opinions and felt I had some expertise. But did that make me a thought leader?

Since then, Web 2.0 has changed the way we are perceived by others. It gave us an opportunity to exist which became an obligation to maintain our online presence: whether we like it or not, we are the content we publish.

Jeff Bullas has built a strong personal brand through his blog and he articulates in this post the 10 principles he’s prescribing to develop your personal brand.

10 is a lot. And this list might sound overwhelming… So here’s my take on it:

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SEO: what it used to be vs what it is now

Posted on
November 10, 2014
by

SEO: what it used to be vs what it is now

With Panda, Penguin and all the other Google updates, SEO has changed over the years. What used to work doesn’t anymore.

Source: www.quicksprout.com

As many have observed for some time now, SEO has completely changed over the past few years. From being machine-centric, it became people-centric. But what does it mean concretely to content marketers?

This infographic by Neil Patel gives a number of interesting points, a couple of which I want to comment:

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The Desert Island: the future is the curated Web for Steve Rosenbaum in Curate This!

Posted on
November 7, 2014
by

Curate this! by Steve Rosenbaum

Three and half years ago, my friend Steve Rosenbaum came out with a book that had a huge impact: Curation Nation. He described perhaps better than anyone else how much content curation was needed and how important a trend it will be. His latest book Curate This! just got published and it’s a fantastic read: not only is it a curation jewel in itself but he also introduces a new concept that paints the future of what the Web could eventually become: the desert island.

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Be Human in Your Content Marketing

Posted on
November 6, 2014
by

Don't be a robot content marketer

Here’s one of the most significant tenets of content marketing: People like to do business with other people. They don’t like to do business with faceless, anonymous, inhuman brands or big corporations.

Source: www.business2community.com

Occasionally people ask us how they could fully automate their content publishing. They’d like to not only get content suggestions automatically but also that this content be published automatically. They’d want to set up once and then forget their content marketing while just reaping the benefits of it. I don’t blame them and I even understand them. But content simply doesn’t work that way for the precise reason Amanda Clark from Grammar Chic introduces this post we’ve curated.

Communication is fundamentally human.

It’s not just an ethical question but it’s also a matter of efficiency

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Inbound Marketing: the power of content curation

Posted on
November 5, 2014
by

Inbound marketing is definitely more efficient and appealing to the sophisticated modern customer than traditional interruptive outbound techniques. But for inbound marketing to work, you need to have its lifeblood: content.

Source: www.slideshare.net

This Slideshare is from a talk @Marc Rougier recently gave on how content curation helps to solve inbound marketing #1 pain point: scaling the content you publish to feed your landing pages and conversion loops.

Content curation has played an important role in content marketing for some time now. And as content Marketing and inbound marketing are converging – especially for B2B marketers who are looking for ROI – we wanted to look specifically at what it brought to inbound marketers specifically.

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Turning 3: How Scoop.it Grew To 3,000 SMB And Enterprise Clients In The Past Year

Posted on
November 4, 2014
by

When I became an entrepreneur, I was told by some friends that the odds of my startup turning 3 were practically non existent. I’m not sure if that statistic is really true but it stayed with me as some kind of magic number – a bit like turning 18 was fascinating to me as a teenager, imagining I would suddenly become a grown-up overnight. Somehow we beat the odds back then with Musiwave (my former startup) and today I’m excited to announce we’re doing it again with the Scoop.it team and community: it’s now been officially 3 years since we launched Scoop.it!

Here are some of the milestones we’ve achieved in the past year thanks to your support.

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Posted in
Product News

Are you using Lego blocks to make your Content Marketing lean?

Posted on
October 30, 2014
by

Creating original content on an ongoing basis can be a challenge, so most marketers practice the fine art of content repurposing.

Source: www.toprankblog.com

As a kid my favorite game was to play Lego and build, deconstruct and rebuild stuff (spaceships mostly: I’m a geek…). As a father, I’ve been fascinated to see that construction game becoming my kids’ favorite too and see what they came out with in terms of new ideas to build. This is what this post by Leed Odden made me think about so here’s a good question for all content marketers:

Are you thinking of your content as modular lego-type building blocks?

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3 Practical Ideas To Make Content Marketing Everybody’s Job

Posted on
October 29, 2014
by

content marketing should be team work

“The need for content has moved beyond a traditional marketing department’s ability to create and is now everyone’s job.”

Source: www.ducttapemarketing.com

Or why Content Marketing needs to grow beyond the marketing team (as I also wrote about in that post). Now, where I disagree with John Jantsch is when he uses the word “creation”. I talk to hundreds of business owners, entrepreneurs and even VP Marketing at larger companies which all tell me how incredibly hard it is to get non-marketers to create content.

Don’t fool yourself: you won’t get everybody to create content.

But here’s what you can do very easily.

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Your Business Blog Sucks. Here are 6 Reasons Why.

Posted on
October 28, 2014
by

“Content is king!”

“Content is the new SEO!”

“Content is the new PR!”

What isn’t content these days? You hear about it all the time, you know you have to do it, you might even be doing it. But, are you doing it right? Just because you’ve started a blog, doesn’t mean you’re a content marketer. Don’t worry, though, I’m here with a few reasons why your blog might suck and some tips to change that

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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Content Curation (but were afraid to ask)

Posted on
October 22, 2014
by

“What can content curation do for you? Who is it for? What are interesting case studies? How does content curation help SEO? What’s the ROI of content marketing in general and how does content curation help improve it? What features does Scoop.it have? How do they work?”

These are just some of the questions you’ll find answers for in our newly revamped resource center as well as in our brand new product tour page

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3 Key Take-Aways for Content Marketers From the 2015 CMI/MarketingProfs Benchmark

Posted on
October 10, 2014
by

“This is the fifth year that MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute have put together this report on how marketers use content in their marketing mix. With changes in the industry, the report may look a little different than you remember.”

Source: www.slideshare.net

Content Marketing is being adopted very quickly, especially by B2B Marketers. The Content Marketing Institute together with MarketingProfs published this great report that gives many enlightening facts about the key challenges they face and how they resolve them.

Among other great findings, here’s what I found particularly interesting:

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6 Ways to Enrich Content and Media Online

Posted on
October 9, 2014
by

Media richness is defined as a reduction of ambiguity. Whereas text can be misinterpreted, images and videos provide more concise delivery of information.

In an era when the average person skims content for the juiciest and most useful bits, companies have to say more with less and be very direct with content. Your web-using customer base prefers websites that specifically limit content length to six-second videos or 140-character posts, so your content should achieve brevity.

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Community feedback: asking is just the beginning

Posted on
October 8, 2014
by

This morning in the always fast-paced tweet chat run by Buffer, an interesting topic came up that I feel is often overlooked by community builders and brands. The subject of the conversation was Nir Eyal‘s Hook Model, which essentially helps brands build habit-forming products.

A question was raised concerning how to figure out the current pain points of users of a platform or product, and the number one answer, of course, was to “ASK!!!”

Asking is, of course, the first part of the answer to this question, but it certainly isn’t the only one; and I don’t even think it’s the most important one. Having led community input efforts for Scoop.it’s redesign last year, I learned the importance of the next two steps of the community feedback loop.

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Posted in
Best Practices, Opinion

Why even IBM needs SMB marketing software

Posted on
September 25, 2014
by

“Employees at the brand at IBM. How about at your company?”

Marketers used to buy ads, PR and creative work. Now they also buy software. This is new and this is a big change. A clear example of that trend, Marketo‘s massive success is 100% built on marketing software – a category which didn’t exist 10 years ago. Beyond Marketo, an entire ecosystem has developed ranking from marketing automation to inbound marketing and content marketing. Some say this space is crowded but the fact is no one denies anymore that software tools have proven useful to understand “which 50% of my marketing spending is efficient“.

The success of these tools has been to be designed for marketers by marketers. The same way Salesforce.com used the language of the VP Sales and not the language of CFO’s, marketing software vendors owe a big part of their success to speaking the language of marketers. Demand generation, campaigns, leads, funnel, nurturing, editorial calendars, brand assets, landing pages, open rates, click-through rates… The jargon is undoubtably omnipresent in these tools because they’re focused on being understood and used by one unique user category: marketers.

This needs to change.

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10 Scoop.it Hacks You Might Have Been Overlooking

Posted on
September 23, 2014
by


Building a product is fun. Building a dynamic platform is even more fun. Did you know that Scoop.it has the best engineering team in the entire world, and that they put out a new release of the platform almost every week?

In each of these releases, there are little new features and hacks that aren’t always announced. Some are data-backed and meant to help our team figure out what works and what doesn’t within the platform, but others are little gifts to you, the curators, and I’ve compiled a few so that you can all get up to date on what you might have been missing.

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New Resource: The Quickstart Guide To Integrate Curated Content to WordPress

Posted on
September 22, 2014
by

Wordpress is an awesome platform that we’ve integrated with for a long-time: as many Wordpress users told us, maintaining visibility of your blog through your created content only can be tough and time-consuming.

“I need more content for my Wordpress!”

We’ve heard that sentence a lot. Many of you told us you wanted to add curated content to your Wordpress site in a way that would be both easy and efficient – which is what we’ve been focusing on through he various iterations of our Wordpress integration.

We recently launched the latest version of this integration and today we wanted to elaborate on the benefits it brings and how you can leverage them to make the most of your Scoop.it + Wordpress combination for improved SEO, traffic generation or lead conversion. This is why we’ve created this quickstart guide that details everything you need to know when considering adding curated content to Wordpress.

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If you still think curation doesn’t add value, watch this music video

Posted on
September 18, 2014
by

This guy created a remix of 23 music videos from YouTube to create awesomeness.

Source: www.youtube.com

Ever since we started working on content curation, we’ve had this question: is content curation adding value? Is it stealing? Is it repeating like a parrot?

And ever since we started, we’ve seen more and more examples of how the remix culture is becoming a massive trend.

Just like good DJ’s, good content curators are creating something new out of the existing by not only aggregating but giving new meaning to content.

This video made me speechless. Isn’t it amazing?

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SMBs: You Don’t Need an Expensive Content Calendar Tool

Posted on
September 18, 2014
by

…you need good content.

Last week, back from Content Marketing World 2014, Jay Baer noted that over the last 12 months, the number of content marketing software vendors had exploded, forcing the vendor and expo area to massively expand. How many exactly were participating? Too many according to him. And because these companies were not sustainable yet but spending their VC’s money, he predicted a big shakeout will happen.

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The Problem With “Staying Relevant”

Posted on
September 11, 2014
by

I tend to find inspiration in strange places. Last week, I was listening to a podcast with a few of my favorite stand-up comedians expecting nothing more than a few chuckles. Interestingly, they began talking about what it’s like to be a comedian in the age of the Internet and the pressure to “keep their personal brands alive” and “stay relevant” with fresh jokes on a more consistent basis than they can write.

As comedians, these two were put off by the notion that everything online these days is about marketing, whether it be your product, yourself, or even your jokes. One of the quotes that specifically inspired me went something like this: “Everything online is marketing these days. Why can’t we just make good stuff and then people who like it will watch it?”

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How You Can Prepare for Twitter’s Potential Upcoming Changes

Posted on
September 8, 2014
by

Twitter strategy might be shifting and the implications for our personal and business experience could be profound.

Source: www.businessesgrow.com

If you’re in social media marketing, you probably cringe at the mention of the word EdgeRank. I know I do, because it makes me think of how frustrating it is that even the best of my brand’s Facebook content might not be seen by more than 200 or 300 of our 57,000 fans unless I spend money to promote it.

Brace yourselves, social marketers, because algorithms just like Facebook’s EdgeRank might be coming to Twitter. In this post by our friend Mark Schaeffer, you can learn about some of the reasons why Twitter is thinking about implementing this, including the pressure from investors now that Twitter has gone public.

Mark brings up some great points for both sides like the fact that, with so many active users, “an unfiltered news stream can seem overwhelming,” but one of the best things about Twitter is that it’s completely unfiltered because  it allows for news to break in real time; something we see happening more and more each day.

According to Mark – and most marketers including myself happen to agree – Twitter will ultimately end up implementing an algorithm that determines what updates you see depending on elements like trending topics and interaction history, which will make organic reach plummet which would effectively eliminate the main differentiator of Twitter from Facebook.

What can do you, then, to prepare for this change?  

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Can you afford to have a content strategy that isn’t lean?

Posted on
August 28, 2014
by

“As content marketing has become a vital strategy for brands and agencies, the need to measure the success of that content has grown as well.  An Aberdeen Group report revealed that the most effective content marketers are also those most likely to measure.”

Source: blog.visual.ly

This report by the Aberdeen Group highlights the need to measure results as a key success factor in content marketing.

Beyond this key findings – companies which measure tend to do better – there are interesting numbers as those in the above chart. The companies surveyed in this report had a customer acquisition cost of $20-$30,000.

Does this feel a lot to you?

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Third-party content is 4x to 7x more trusted than your own

Posted on
August 26, 2014
by

“I had always believed that most of the marketing content used by a company should be developed internally (…). Because of three recent research studies, I now have a different view on this issue.”

Source: customerthink.com

Some people still think that the only type of content that can demonstrate your expertise and show your thought leadership is the one you create.

If you’re still thinking that, think again as the data has spoken.

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