Content curation is sharing content that has been created by others, after adding value to it, to make it more relevant to your audience base. Curation is a great way to engage customers by keeping your blog and social media pages rich with new content. Finding relevant content and publishing it is a time consuming task, and therefore, most businesses are unable to experience the true potential of blogging. To help overcome the hurdle, here are seven handy tools that make curation just a little bit easier.

Sometimes, the issue isn’t finding good content to curate – it’s finding the time to review the content that you receive from a variety of sources (email, Twitter, Facebook, other curation tools, or simply searching the internet). When you do have time, it can be nearly impossible to find the content you wanted to review. Pocket solves this problem, by providing you with a place to store content until you are ready to view it.

If you want the best content for your readers, your best sources are the ones closest to home. This means the companies and individuals who share your goals and target audience. To use Triberr, you need to log in and then seek out members of your tribes. This is easy to do, because the various tribes on Triberr are segmented according to the interests of their members. Once you join a tribe, you can interact with others, and, best of all, curate some great, relevant content. Join the right tribe, and you might pick up some insider knowledge, too.

Post Planner, though not free, has a low subscription cost. The cost however is well worth it. If you aren’t sharing content in a well-planned manner and you aren’t consistent in your posting, you’re missing out on the chance to engage members of your audience. This is especially true if your customer base crosses multiple time zones. Post Planner makes it easy to curate content on a 24-hour cycle, by allowing you to schedule posts, whenever you want. Post Planner is also a great tool for promoting the curated content that has really gained traction.

One of the reasons that content curation is so popular is that it helps business owners, who don’t have the resources to keep up a steady stream of original content, keep their customers engaged. Trustmypaper.com can also help business owners in a similar fashion by creating custom content for their audiences. In addition to this, it also enables the user to edit, proofread, and rewrite content, in order to make it more appropriate for a specific target customer base.

Telling a story is a powerful way to speak to your customers about your brand. It is also a great way to engage your audience and get them to answer your call to action. Storify allows you to gather images that you find, social media posts, and content that you have created, in order to build compelling stories. Once your stories have been created, you can store them on Storify for others to use. If you find a story your customer base will like, you are free to share it with them.

The hotter your content is, the easier it is to find in searches. Unfortunately, digging through news media websites, industry magazines, pop culture and entertainment websites, and tech blogs can take hours. This is too much time to waste, especially if you are in an industry where your customer base expects you to be on top of things. AllTop gis a handy tool that provides the latest trending stories from numerous resources, such as the New York Times, Fast Company, Mashable, TechCrunch, CNN, and other major players. If you create an account, you can customize the content that you receive.

My Curator is a plugin that you must consider, if you are using WordPress for your company website or blog. Essentially, My Curator feeds relevant news and other content for you to select and share with your visitors. You can further customize the content that your audience sees by selecting the news feeds that you believe are the most relevant for your customers. My Curator is a great tool for anybody who needs a hands-off solution. Each piece of content that you are offered contains everything you need to share it. This includes an image, a link for attribution, and a blurb. Business owners love this plugin, because they know that engagement keeps customers viewing pages longer and increases the likelihood that they will ultimately make a purchase. If spam is a concern, don’t worry; this plugin does a great job of filtering out both spam and irrelevant content.

About the Author

Julie Ellis – blogger, content strategist and traveler. As a business writer, she’s been featured on such websites as Business2Community, SocialMediaToday, Business.com and others.

When she’s not engaged in helping her customers and students, you can find her reading articles and books of young writers and attending marketing conferences.

Follow Julie’s Twitter and Google+ to learn more about academic and business writing skills.